- Work at home ... you become a hermit... working from home a couple times a month or once a week when you have to go into the office 5 days a week is a blessing. Working from home 100% of the time becomes to wear on you. I am not a guy with a weight problem, however I gained 20 pounds in the first two months of working for this company due to being at home and sitting down with your kitchen an arms reach away.
- The pay. If I recall correctly (has been about 3 years since i left) we were started out at $12.50 with a dangling carrot of performance reviews every 90 days which "usually" result in a pay increase. I worked for this company for just under 2 years before I left, and I was still making the same $12.50 I was paid during the first two weeks of training. We were told that since so many people were hired to meet the demand of this great company, the company was working in the black (no profits) for the first couple of months. We were advised that within a couple of months and definetly by the 90 day review period, there will be displayed profits and employees would be eligible for a pay bump or bonus. During my almost 2 year stay at this company, I was told that the company was still in the black and losing money every single time I or another employee I was friends with inquired about a raise.
- Overhead. This goes with work-at-home and the-pay but deserves its own section. Employees were paid a very modest hourly wage and the only piece of equipment Support.com provided was a headset. What i am getting at here is that every single employee saved the company money by running their own computer with two monitors (basically a requirement by the time I left). Each employee then paid for their own broadband internet connection that had to meet VoIP QoS criteria (meaning you couldn't just get the cheapest plan out there). You purchased your own office furniture, paid your electric and internet bill... What I wanted to get at here is that Support.com would waive the "Work-at-home" flag in front of people struggling in a poor economy with one of the lowest hourly rates for this type of position and eliminated the overhead most other companies would have to budget for and still make a profit.... Support.com paid each employee 28,080 dollars a year and avoided any overhead costs while running a real busy call center (no exaggeration, i would be taking calls non-stop from the beginning of my shift until the end) resulting in each employee servicing at minimm 2 (on average) $150 paid services per hour.... and still somehow failed to turn a profit...
Now, I am not a business major nor pretend to be a know-it-all on the subject, but a company that has 3000 or so employees and is only a couple years old could not survive for 3, 4, 5 years without turning a profit consistently every quarter from its inception. The morale amongst my colleagues was very low also, since everyone knew how much money the company made on each call (5 minute printer setup that a customer paid $185), the company was "still loosing money" and absolutely nobody received a raise or bonus.
- The Employees, I was hired during the huge hiring boom at Support.com in the spring of 2010 (april). I was 1 out of probably a thousand remote desktop support "engineers" hired. I have a very solid IT CV with degrees to boot, however many people that were hired at the same time as me to perform the same duties as I was had no previos IT experience at all. When I say no experience, I don't mean a young wiz kid that simply did not go to school for computer science.. I am talking people that worked in a grocery store for most of their life and now at 55 were unemployed were hired to "fix" other poor souls' computers at a hefty price. Every employee in my department held the title of Solutions Engineer whether you were a butcher for all of your life or had a diploma and 10 years of experience.
Now, you can be a carpenter for 50 years and never touch a computer and simply have the genetic skill set to pick up the remedial knowledge needed to do this job well on the fly. A lot of people did just that and become model employees, however the other folks that did not catch on would get "lost in the system" without getting trained or terminated and therefore resulted in creating some of the most irate customers I have ever heard. I could imagine a customer's frustration after they paid $200 for a virus removal and a "technician/engineer" spent 6 hours on their machine running malware scan after malware scan without ever getting the computer fixed... This happened, and it happened a lot.
This company ran a "legal" IT support sweatshop, I can't see it any other way.
