When I first started working at SolarCity, the management was great, the training was top notch, and the pay was excellent. You got paid on every cw (contract signed), and the motivation was huge. There were weekly video calls for the entire company and they offered prizes, cash rewards, and we were constantly motivated to be the best. It was the first company I ever worked for where I'd rather be at work than at home. Even on my days off I was checking my sales to see if they closed, because each one was money! It was such a great experience and we all made wonderful friends and connections. But then the company started going a different direction. People high up in rank got laid off, communication among management started to tank, and they made it much harder to get a commission check. You no longer got paid on cw's; instead you were paid on a final contract, which occurred after the cw and the site survey, assuming everything went well and the energy consultant was able to get back in touch with your customer, which wasn't as often as you might think. So instead of getting paid on 10-12+ cw's, we started getting paid on 2-3 final contracts, at a cheaper payout. And much more recently, they changed things around again. After laying off at least 20% of the employees, we get paid on cw's again! Yay! But wait, we have to get a minimum of 5 just to keep our jobs, and we don't even get paid on the first 4. And our rates are higher than they were a couple of years ago, making customers think twice. Plus customers are holding out until the solar roof. And today's fec's can barely close anything compared to the fec's back in the day. due to the sub-par training. So now not only do we generate opps (leads in the store), our entire paycheck and career at this company rely on the salesmanship of the fec's. Also, apparently the fec training sucks too, because our numbers have severely decreased across the board, which in turn brings down motivation to get opps. Multiple people have generated 40+ opps and gotten only 2 or 3 cw's, which they won't even get paid on and will get a warning or put on a pip because they didn't get the minimum of 5. So now when you should see happy, motivated fes's in Home Depot's and Best Buys, you'll instead find them at their laptops writing negative reviews on Glassdoor and job searching so they'll have a backup job for when our hard earned opps go nowhere and we inevitably get fired.
Pay has decreased
For the past several months, fec's (the in-home consultant) have been required to go into stores and self generate their own leads without giving us credit towards our quota, which, along with our increased goal, tells me the fes position is slowly being phased out
Communication in this company is absolutely atrocious. We're supposed to be notified when an fec is let go so we can properly reassign our customers to other people, but we are NEVER informed, which means the customer is left in the dust and it gives them a terrible experience. I know I've lost potentially hundreds if not thousands of dollars because we couldn't get a simple two second email
Because of the less than mediocre training and high turnover rate, a promotion is basically a faster way to get laid off.
There was a National call several months ago saying they're suing employees who give leads to other solar companies, and they're suing them for millions of dollars. On the surface I get it, sort of. You don't want to get a lead here and then pass it off to another company that'll pay you more. That robs SolarCity of the opportunity to help the customer. But there are thousands of customers that SC refuses to put solar panels on their homes for one reason or another, whether it be the customer doesn't have good enough credit, they have a roof the company doesn't want to install on, it won't produce enough to make it financially worth it for SC, etc., whereas other companies might be willing to help that customer out. If an employee referred a customer that SolarCity refused to help to another company and SolarCity found out, they'd sue that employee for everything they had. Not a great culture for a company that claims they want to better the planet.
