Pros
If you are the kind of person who just wants to clock in, do your job, get your hours, and then go home, you might like this place. There is little to moderate worker accountability. Scheduling is relatively flexible, so if you need to get something done, take a long lunch, or work some weird hours for a bit, you shouldn't have any issues. Everything else "Pro" is that many things are merely adequate, like tools, trucks, equipment, computers, benefits, management, etc, are all barely functioning enough to qualify as "functioning". There are a few good people peppered throughout the company, and you will find some people who will sympathize and try to help. But in the end there is far too much bullheadedness and ignorance is bliss going around to feel positive about the work environment.
Cons
Training is a joke. You will spend the first few days watching campy videos and taking poorly worded quizzes, then they put you in the passenger seat of a truck for a week, then they give you a route the next. There is nothing about the training that is remotely comprehensive. You will spend the next few years leaning everything the hard way. We regularly get told we have been doing things the wrong way all along, and everybody was just going off of what someone else has been doing, and no one really knows the regulations. The computer systems they have are ridiculously impractical and the software development teams have no idea what we actually do and need to be able to do, and they don't ask either. The company Stericycle has been going around for years buying up other companies and forcing integration without understanding the nuances of the industries they are buying. The original company is a very simple company which started dominating a very simple part of the medical waste industry, then decided it wanted to buy up tons of other semi-related industries which it knows nothing about and tell them all how it's going to be from now on, then stop listening to their feedback. A major part of this feedback problem is that Stericycle isolates the employees from people who can change things by putting middle mangers in the way. The people who can make changes are several states away and surrounded by yes-men and insulated by overpaid middle-mangers. The company constantly boasts about it's record profits, yet keeps pay raises capped at 3% year max no matter what your performance, while the facility is literally falling apart around you and all the equipment is in major disrepair. They will keep a rotation of temp labor coming in to do shop labor and not train them whatsoever. This is illegal, yet it is common practice. When you talk about safety issues you will eventually figure out you are just bothering them, and nothing will change if it requires more that a few bucks to fix. Safe work practices are not promoted and the cowboy mentality is more than tolerated. The people in the office have little true knowledge of the regulations and rely on asking each other their opinion, rather than looking it up. There is no real training for the office side either, so you have a bunch of people best-guessing their way around a regulated industry. Any type of change, no matter how simple or justified, is met with resistance. The "well this is the way we've always done it" mindset rules in every aspect. The outside sales reps are admittedly under-trained too. They wind up getting confused or confusing the customer or making guarantees or regulatory judgements with the customer when they have no idea what they are talking about. They are trying their best, but are simply under-trained to a major fault. So this means your customers are frustrated regularly because what they were told you were going to do and what you are capable of doing is in no way similar. Stericycle launches new programs and services for the customer, yet spends absolutely no effort enlightening the employees as to what is going on and how to use it. You will constantly exclaim "Wow, I didn't realize we did that", and "I'm not familiar with that service, but let me get back to you on that". I have at this point decided to stop ranting, but I have much much more...
