Company is okay, but you could do better - Systems Administrator iVenture Solutions Employee Review

I have to very much agree with a previous comment about this place being an IT sweatshop. The company is always hiring new people for their main office in Jacksonville, but not so much in their Tampa and Orlando offices. Granted, the other offices don’t have the number of clients that JAX does, but it starts to get overwhelming at times due to the quantity of tickets and phone calls. Most people that get hired come in as an FRT, which is more or less a Level 1 help desk. They have to field calls and emails for ALL clients across three different offices. You have to perform an initial triage and attempt to fix in ten minutes or less, and either move it on to the service desk for that particular team or take a beating from the manager of that team. If you are on an actual team, then you are expected to fix problems in the least amount of time, otherwise you will get beat up every Friday at the team meeting about how much time you spent on a ticket or how little time you were logged into your phone. Team leads attempt to give verbal credit to other team members, but anyone can tell that it is fake, only for show. It can be a very stressful work environment at times. Daily verbal abuse about being logged into your phone, and taking tickets as soon as they hit the board. People have trouble concentrating on working the tickets when the IM is constantly blowing up from other office team members because they have someone on the phone from one of your clients that have to speak to someone this second and won’t take no for an answer. Because of this, the work environment does feel sterile and introverted. There is definitely not much communication between members from different teams, and sometimes between your own team members. Some team leads appear to lack real management skills, which can lead to employee growth stagnation. HR also doesn’t appear to get involved in bettering the careers of employees, other that the yearly mandated career path review. Pay scale is the biggest item that is routinely mentioned by both current and past employees. HR will argue that they do everything they can when it comes to pay, that they are competitive and fair, but in fact, pay could be much better. They require that new people stepping into a Helpdesk Technician positon have a bachelor’s degree, yet will want to start you off well below industry standard for a similar position. They will do what they can to start you off at, and keep you close to the lowest level possible just to keep you there. Yearly raises are usually less than $1. The company will also survey you to death, especially in the beginning of the year the ‘Best Places to Work’ surveys come out. They bribe the offices with a free catered lunch in exchange for your ‘stellar 5-star response’ in hopes of making them look really attractive to potential new hires and clients. Fact is, they are taking on more clients than the current level of available techs can handle. Hiring of new techs is very nitpicky during the interview process, which leads to people with some potential not making the cut because they don’t want to invest any time in real training or molding someone to be the tech they are looking for. If you’re young and fresh out of college with little experience, this place will provide some skills to broaden your resume. If you’re looking for longevity and good salary, keep looking, there are better places out there.