Plenty of PTO, not enough pay but are we Reed Elsevier, LexisNexis, or InsurQuote?
Pros
You start with 18 paid days off. After 2 years that increases to 23 days. After 7 years it increases to 28 days. There is also an option to purchase 5 additional days off, which is taken out of your paychecks. In addition to PTO are 10 paid holidays. Medical benefit options aren't so good, but begin on your first day of work (at least back when we were "ChoicePoint" that is how it was and I don't think it has changed because not much else has changed since then). If you go with a High Deductible plan and get a Health Savings Account, the company contributes $400 for singles, $800 for families to your HSA (it used to be $750 and $1500). We have a semi-flexible schedule. We can arrive anytime between 7am and 9am and can skip a lunch break if you don't want it (you can eat during one of your two 15 minute breaks). You also get to learn more than you ever wanted to know about the auto insurance industry. There is no micromanagement or desk sharing. When you move to a new desk your computer and two LCD monitors go with you. The dress code is casual (not too casual of course) and hats are acceptable. If you contribute 6% of your pay to retirement, the company matches it and doubles the last percentage point. However, the low pay makes it hard to contribute even that small of a percentage. You don't have to clock in, just type in the hours you were in the office in a web-based time card, which gets approved by your supervisor.
Cons
The pay is very low. Upper management is completely ignorant of employees' concerns. There is very, very little opportunity to receive a promotion or a reasonable pay raise. After over 5 years here, I make less than 10% more than when I started (which wasn't much to begin with). By comparison, at my previous employer my pay was over 20% higher than what I started with after THREE years. Everything is slowly getting worse. We used to be able to work 4 days a week and at our own hours, and sometimes at home. Now we are required to be in the office between 9am and 3pm Monday-Friday "in case we want to hold an emergency meeting with the team in Ohio." In my 5+ years here, nothing like that has ever happened. This job is so easy to do at home, it makes no sense to me to take that away from us. We also used to be able to work on Saturday to make up hours if we were short for the week, or so we could take a weekday off without using PTO. The bi-weekly paychecks are for the immediate preceding two weeks, You get paid every other Friday. So, you get paid for hours you haven't yet worked on the Friday pay days. Some people might like this, but it's not to my liking. In a meeting a year or so ago, upper management went over an employee survey we were provided. One section went over the comments we were able to leave. About half the employees in this office left comments and about half of those comments explained that we are not financially compensated fairly. An upper manager brushed off the comments and said those people were just having a bad day when they wrote their comments. She went on to say that LexisNexis did not do this to us and that LexisNexis is trying to help us. We were part of ChoicePoint when Reed Elsevier bought us out, so she blames ChoicePoint for our low pay. However, we've been part of LexisNexis for over 3 years and very little has changed. Along with a few more paid days off than we already had, one big change is that it is nearly impossible to receive a promotion. She also said we are not rocket scientists and don't deserve rocket scientist pay. We just want to be paid fairly and we feel that we aren't. This shows how upper management is out of touch with the front line workers. We also had a meeting last month about career development. Apparently more than half of us are dissatisfied with our career opportunities here so upper management decided to hold a meeting about it. Basically it concluded that if you don't like it here, find a different job. They actually gave good advice about picking up additional skills to make yourself more versatile, but much of it doesn't apply to our small segment. I've worked both "testing" and "programming." The pay and job title are exactly the same. Moving from testing to programming is NOT a promotion (though programming is more interesting work than testing). The programming language used is a proprietary version of Turbo Pascal. This means that you don't really learn programming that you can take with you to other jobs. Testing just uses Excel and some internally developed tools which also gives you experience you can't really take to another job. We do not create test cases. The internal testing tools literally feel like they are from the late 90s. Virtually everything you get trained to do here will only do you good here. As such, we are easily replaceable with only a small learning curve for new employees. But they don't like to replace people so we have to pick up the slack anytime someone leaves the company. When asked where I work I don't know what to say. I work for InsurQuote, which is owned by LexisNexis, which is owned by Reed Elsevier. When asked what my job is, I have no good answer. The very generic "Content Specialist" is the official job title of the "testers" and "programmers." The only real motivation to do work is so you won't get fired. PTO is a "use it or lose it" deal. If you have PTO left at the end of the year, none of it carries over to the next year and you do not get paid out for unused PTO (even if you bought PTO and didn't use it). Using all that PTO isn't hard to do though, and I've never been denied using PTO even if it's on the same day I request it. It's also okay to go into negative PTO balance. They say we cannot wear shorts of any kind, even though it gets very hot during the summer and we don't deal with the public at all. This is possibly localized only to this office (InsurQuote) and I've seen coworkers ignore this rule.
