Pros
Good pay. They spend a lot of money on marketing and equipment that can be used as a marketing tool for sales
Cons
Lots of underhanded tactics to gain, maintain, and grow sales. I decided to join because they made me an offer I couldn't refuse to come over from the competition, because I was crushing them. They had been recruiting me for 8 years since I was an intern. I always refused because I would uncover their reps constantly lying and pulling the wool over their customers' eyes. Finally with the offer, I decided to put my narrow experience behind me and assume the rest of the company wasn't like that. I was disappointed. My manager left me to learn on my own with only 2 weeks of shadowing him. He sent a few of the old reps to train me for a few days, but they were condescending most of the time and if I called for help in urgent situations they just told me to look in the files (which covered 15 years). I covered 3 refineries with one technician with just a few years of experience and a non-science major. This territory used to be covered by 6 people with a combined 175 years experience. I was promised that more people would be hired to help out when I was hired which was why I agreed to join. That never happened. As a result my work days averaged 16 hours and I slept in my car many nights to be able to sleep more and not waste my time driving home and back. I was in an accident with a company car where the chief of police was an eye witness to the entire incident and I was found not at fault by him and the other 6 officers that showed up and the insurance company. Yet, the company decided it was a preventable accident and forced me to fly on my own dime to corporate office to defend myself which I did with piles of information contradicting the claims they were making. I was fired just a few days later. The company only said they were moving on without me. I later found out that the person at corporate screaming at me was made to put on that performance by his boss who sat next to him silent for the whole ordeal even though he didn't believe what he was saying to protect himself. I also found out that my boss was forced to fire me despite knowing the whole story and also believing I was not at fault. Apparently he had trouble sleeping for a while with guilt. I figured out that many of the chemicals being used at one of the refineries weren't even necessary after self teaching myself what I needed to know to properly service the customer and my programs. I was told by those trainers "don't say anything to anyone and keep pumping the chemical". So, I went right to the asset engineer and gave him an entire report printed on paper without my name or company on it and told him that he didn't get it from me and let me know when he came to his own conclusion. He came back to my desk later in the day and told me to shut it off and ship the unused inventory back. I further reduced their spend by 55% which avoided a competitive bid. As expected and consistent with my experience inside and outside the company, I was chastised for the improvements. However, the customer told me that because of my great work, they would not be moving forward with the bid and it had been cancelled. This did not make my management chain any less pissed off at me for reducing revenue.
