If you work on the electric side, it's extremely hard to next to impossible to go up the ladder if you don't have an EE, even harder if you are not a minority of some type. As others have stated, if you don't have an EE you will be treated as a second class citizen in this corporate culture. If you are a female or minority (even better if you are both) and have an EE, you are a golden child at CE. CE thinks an EE is a management degree as they tend to put a lot of EE's into management positions. Just a clue, many engineers are not good leaders nor managers because many of them are introverts and really lack people skills.
We have an abundance of managers but very few leaders. There is a huge difference between the two. If you are a leader you will probably not get into a management position. I think upper management fears leaders as they just really want "yes" people not free thinking go-getters. They really don't want someone who will ask hard questions and want discussion.
CE tends to hire as well as promote based much more on race and sex and a lot less on what you are capable of doing. Raises typically are small (goes up the amount that your labor grade goes up compared to other companies in the industry). Sometimes they don't keep up with the rate of inflation. In some non-exempt positions, you have to turn in a lot of paperwork to a committee and wait 3-12 months before you get your promotion. This keeps getting worse in the "Electric System Owner" role yet their co-workers with an EE who do the same work get their promotion strictly based on time in the position (they have to prove nothing and quite frankly they probably couldn't). This does put strain in our department.
Some other utilities I have worked with and been around during mutual assistance are very stuck in the past with their technological tools. Some are 20 years plus behind. Consumers is not, however, they typically don't choose their software products well at all.
A few years ago we went with SAP for doing our work management, material ordering, customer records, among other things. This has been a TOTAL FAILURE. Management has to get to the point to do something about it. It's hard for them as they've spent millions on this but it just isn't getting better. We are being strangled by ever longer processes to get anything done. We have groups that are supposed to streamline processes but all they do is keep making them longer, more difficult, and less efficient. It is so ridiculous that this keeps getting worse but nobody in upper management seems to want to admit it nor address it. It would take a leader to do that and we don't have many of those around here. SAP should be scrapped (as Levi Strauss did) as it has made us more than twice as inefficient as before. One feature that is absent is an auto-save when working on a design ordering materials. If you are in a design and get distracted by a long phone call, etc, you will lose hours worth of work when it kicks you out and doesn't save. Personally, I have lost a cumulative of several weeks worth of work just by this lack of feature alone. This happens company wide so these losses are larger than upper management want to think.
We use a citrix server based GIS system. It is extremely slow to edit because the servers that house it also do other things like payroll processes. It often does not save your work (as in ~30% of the time) and it is lost. It's so bad that we get emails every morning telling us if the server compressed correctly or if data entered the previous day may have been lost. Our CAD system (Microstation) is very dated. We need to change. You'd think we'd go with an industry standard like AutoCAD which integrates right into GIS, but no, we are going with a citrix based GIS type drawing tool. We already know this server gets very overloaded and struggles so now we are going to have other departments in there too and expect different results? I give CE credit for trying to upgrade our tools but for the life of me I can't figure out why we keep going with things that don't allow us to work efficiently. It's like efficiency doesn't matter here.
Our outage system does not send comments to the crews because both the outage system and crew work-management software do not talk well with each other. We live with this even though we know our outage system can be used for crew management as well. It sometimes seems like those making software package decisions have no clue that efficiency is very key to having good productivity.
Lastly, we have been going through a re-org for nearly 2 years now. The idea is to consolidate dispatch and scheduling to just 1 or 2 locations statewide. We are combining headquarters to supposedly better serve our customers, but how can this be if we have fewer headquarters? It has also split up most departments that used to work well together as teams. These splits now have created an attitude of "not my job" so it's very hard to know who is supposed to do what. Any help you may need is often met with push-back because of this attitude. The Field Leaders (called field supervisors at other companies) have been spread very thin and the stress level has risen so high that many of them have had heart issues (some very major heart issues). This re-org aka dis-org has been a huge failure so far. Btw, this has been tried and failed in the past and management admits it. It follows the phrase "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting different results." If you question this with upper management you may well be shown the door and when we talk of you we say you are "seeking new opportunities." Don't try to be a leader here!
We are hiring more and more contract designers meaning there will be less and less company engineers/designers. Nobody knows who is doing what and jobs are duplicating and triplicating the same work ie 3 different designs exist to change a pole because we are a year ahead of construction with designs and nobody is on top of who is designing or designed what.
