Southland uses the internal motto of 'Be Above the Line' but fails to achieve that in even the most basic of senses. This review isn't allowed to be as in-depth as it should be, as names/titles/etc cannot be mentioned. If you work(ed) here, though, you can do the math.
I worked for Southland for roughly 3 years between Contract and full-time employment.
My manager for my first 2+ years had 0 respect for personal time, and felt it necessary to regularly spend 2-3 hours on the phone with me doing absolutely nothing. This happened both during the work day and after hours, and often lead to me later getting reprimanded for not completing a task. To say that working for her was a mental and physical drain on my well-being would be an understatement. I was very happy when she finally left.
Because of my initial position, I was in a constant uphill battle with managers from every other IT Team. Regardless of ideas that were brought to the table to help the IT org as a whole, I was regularly dismissed as a low level tech who didn't know anything and treated as a child. This eventually came to blows in multiple meetings with leadership and never really got addressed. The phrase ‘This is how we’ve always done it’ was regularly used, while trying to pretend that we were innovative.
Other IT teams would regularly make changes to processes without any consideration for the user base or the support team that would have to deal with the fallout. This often lead to my team looking stupid to users, because we didn’t know how to do very basic parts of our jobs, because the process had changed with no alternate solution in place. There was little to no change management process in place, and it wasn’t until early 2020 that the idea of a change management process was even discussed, but it was never implemented while I was there. When offering to provide custom dev work so that our support team could function, I was regularly turned down in favor of big-box tools that did not actually solve our problems. If we couldn’t find a tool, the process became that myself or the other supervisor would have to take on these tasks – simple tasks that I would trust a child with.
I was no longer happy in Las Vegas, as Vegas was a pretty awful place to live, with little-to-no job market for my SO. I requested a transfer to another office (specifically the SoCal office, as I had lived there for 5 years), but was told Tempe was the only option for me. Upon arriving in Tempe, I realized that the cost of living was nowhere near the same to keep the same quality of life, but was repeatedly denied a cost of living increase, as Southland had determined the cost of living is the same.
In Tempe, we had 3 IT support staff employed when I moved here. I made it abundantly clear to all involved parties that I was not going to take on the On-site responsibilities when I moved here, as this was not a part of my previous role in Las Vegas, and I had been promoted into the supervisor role. When I arrived, I found that no one (in IT or otherwise) was aware that I was moving down here, which put my entire team on edge that their job was at risk. It turns out, it was – I was forced to let go of one of our techs within 1 week of my arrival, because management didn’t like him, even tho he was well trained and well-liked by our Tempe staff – This put me behind the ball within a week, and created yet another uphill battle with little support to gain the trust of the Tempe office that I now had to provide primary support for.
Within 6 months, the leadership in the Tempe office had decided that IT didn’t really deserve to have desks or an office, and moved us from our suite into the main office. We had 6 people, but were given 5 desks, and I was sent to work from home with little-to-no support from IT or the business to accomplish this. This would go on until I was let go from the company. On multiple occasions, I was pressured to return to the office, but was never given a desk or a place to even sit, so that didn’t happen.
Southland IT runs on nepotism. If you were not in the ‘in-crowd’, you had very little future at Southland. During my time there, I saw multiple people from Allergen come over into leadership positions, and be promoted further than anyone else during my time there. These individuals did not really understand how to run a department, and cared to spend more time on meetings talking about our next meeting, then actually solving the problems within IT and within our Technology stack.
In the 5 months between my first manager leaving and my new manager arriving, myself and the other supervisor were left to run the department with little to no support from anyone in the org. During this time, we got the teams to actually work well together and repaired relationships that were fractured due to poor leadership by my first manager. Never once were either of us recognized for helping keep the support structure that handled ~80% of the roughly 1500 monthly requests afloat.
At one point, word came down from that leadership wished to eliminate the support team all together (all 6 of them) in favor of having the on-site staff handle all support requests. We pushed back on this as much as we could, but the writing was on the wall that this is what Southland desired to have.
Fast forward to 2020 - COVID hits and leadership is finally given the opportunity to get their way. Only one member of the team was safe, and was newer to the team. Discussions revolved around when and how each member was being termed. During this time, everyone was super hush-hush, even though we are in the midst of a pandemic, and I regularly stated that we should consider giving heads up to our employees if we really cared about them as much as we pretended to - which fell on deaf ears.
Come to find out, the reason these ears were deaf was because I was asking to know about my own termination. A week before I was termed, I started getting cryptic requests asking me to hand over custom dev and other meaningless tasks to the team. By meaningless, I mean parts of my job that were small, easy to pass off. None of the items that I handled that required indepth knowledge were mentioned, nor handed off. Never once was it mentioned that I would be a victim of COVID nor the reason I was handing these off, but I'm smarter than Southland gave me credit for and I knew the writing was on the wall.
After my weekly meeting was rescheduled for Monday at 9am (the typical term time for Southland), I knew it was a wrap. Once i got on the call, HR joined and I was let go. It was at THIS POINT that I was told I could stay and hand over my duties to the rest of the team. But - my roles and responsibilities were not designed to be able to be handed over in the matter of days, but rather weeks/months as I was the only person who knew and understood how our support platform worked from the inside out. Ultimately, I left them holding 2 support systems that cost more than my annual salary to maintain and complete, as one week was not enough time and they had plenty of time to address my forthcoming termination prior to that.
Southland IT took COVID as the opportunity to remove the folks they did not like. Members of the team who were less technically skilled and lacked ‘bed-side manner’ are still working there, simply because they do not ‘rock the boat’. Many non-IT members were furloughed, which gave them the opportunity to return to work (and most have returned since then), but this was not an option made available to me.
During my time at Southland, I watched my mental health take a nose-dive, my personal life disappear, and my bank account got smaller. I watched as individuals who did not contribute to the overall success get promoted, and watched talented individuals run for the hills.
