- Healthcare is a good chunk of your paycheck. It's good, but the base pay doesn't really match what they offer you. I feel that it's because they will take every measure to ensure you stay as productive as humanly possible, so naturally some of the benefits are going to reflect that. When all is said and done, after these benefits you aren't left with a lot for yourself.
- Customers are varied and that can be both perfectly delightful and also absolutely horrifying (you don't care about the good ones because of how bad the bad ones can be). You see (or rather, hear) some of the strangest things on the other end of the line, and either way you are expected to roll with it. More recently they've tried to curtail the accessibility to reduce sheer volume of callers, but generally speaking it did not have an effect on the ground level where I was at.
- Oppressively bright work environment. There are literally more fluorescent lights turned on than I have ever seen, and growing up in Albuquerque there were TONS of these in my schools and every building I entered just about, but this building takes lighting to an extreme. It is done in part to make people uncomfortably productive.
- Very few office amenities. Not that an office is supposed to have amenities or anything, but this office had the barest minimum and still managed to budget cut down. I recall actually tearing up over losing the personal trainer because I knew it meant that I would enjoy the work environment significantly less.
- Tools and software are developed in house... and they're not great by any means. The knowledge that we have of the products we're supporting is not in any way helpful, and there are hardware failures on some of these printers that are seemingly unknowable by the tech support reps. Frequently I would tell people that, after 2 years, their printers are failing and that the old ink that they had is obsolete and we use newer, slightly improved versions of what you have and we can offer you.... a discount on a new printer. That's it. It's a vicious cycle and I personally feel that it's a weird ecosystem designed to extract money, because inkjet printers aren't profitable otherwise (nor is tech support for those printers). The issues that we actually can fix are so limited in scope it feels like the entire purpose of the work is to help an aging population understand the cutting edge technology that is WiFi, and to overcome the insurmountable challenge of connecting their Canon printer to their WiFi... it's abysmally unfulfilling work.
- Nonexistent upward mobility. Unless you will painstakingly follow every procedure and have stellar stats, completely nail every interview, and cause zero problems for the management, you simply will not be promoted in any sense of the word. The issue is that the higher tier positions, while highly sought after, aren't adequately paid for what position they hold. They have significantly more tools and knowledge available to them but also handle everything that the base level techs do. There simply are not enough opportunities to go around and the vast majority of the workforce is supporting inkjet printers in the way that I did.
