Connection: work your summer away, for the express opportunity to be treated as a second class citizen.
Pros
The benefits, vacation time, and people (mainly that last one) are what keep most people from scrambling for the door. But as of late even these aspects barely balance out the overwhelming daily stress brought on by the configuration lab.
Cons
Let me start by saying I find it ironic that a company that’s opted to provide a “mental health” day to its employees can care so little about the actual health (mental, physical, or otherwise) for its lab staff on a day-to-day basis. We’re wrapping up the first week of regular 8 hour shifts, coming off of a 5 month string of 10 hour days and Saturdays (we’ve already worked over 20 Saturdays this year). This overtime stint saw technicians physically collapsing at their work stations, and running to their doctors for any sort of protection notices from the constant mental and physical strain allowed by the company’s management. But even on week one of normalcy, we’re seeing the same cycle play out that long-time workers have seen for years. Management is already acting as if they’ve done us a favor by ending this overtime for this one glorious week of what should be a common place thing. We’ve already heard the age old lines of “they’re watching cameras you know” and “we’re not going to take you being understaffed as an excuse anymore”. Yes because openly having big brother looming over our head, and determining which “excuses” are viable is the optimum way to grow morale after a long and grueling half a year. We’re all aware of what is happening behind the scenes. All other departments (especially those related with pushing/“code Redding” orders) are having offsite meetings in attempts to throw the lab under the bus. They’re looking for any possible reason (say a phone in one techs hands) to say we’re slacking, so that overtime can be reasoned back into existence. All of this because management has spent so much time trying to regulate the labs workers, they didn’t think to regulate the amount of sales coming through the pipeline. Well guess what? Because of this we’re already scheduled into next year, and have been for some time. Management has actually stated that “when demand is up, and our supply is down due to supply chain issues, we can’t just throw that on our customers so this pain you feel is normal”. It seems to a lot of us that that’s exactly how this should’ve been handled, as that’s economics 101. But instead of pushing the cost on our customers, we’ve thrown the proverbial load on the backs of lab technicians. We’ve had 10s of technicians leave this company, some of which were close friends that I’ve worked side by side with on configurations. And almost every one of them stated that their reasoning for leaving was due to the excessive overtime. Yet our Human Resources department allegedly had no clue as to why such a mass exodus was happening. Finally, we as techs are sick of seeing our lower level management and leads treated just as bad as us, when they seem to be some of the few individuals willing to stand up for us and the work we’ve put in. A few individuals who manage to troubleshoot for technicians, find issues with orders that were never vetted before they came into the lab, and fill out redundant paperwork that I can only assume their management never takes the time to read. All the same, even some of these lab heroes have been pushed to the breaking point, and have either been forced to find work elsewhere, or change departments to get away from the red tape and overtime. I hope they know that we appreciate the work they’ve put in, and don’t blame them for trying to get away.
