Cool at first, loses its charm quick
Pros
Free shirts, employee discount, salon, clinic, spa and gym, ticket discounts, exposure to cool equipment you’ll never be able to afford, occasional relics.
Cons
When you’re being recruited, they show you the main building, with all the cool stuff and the happy atmosphere. In reality, anyone who works with their hands gets pushed off to the warehouse out back. Unless you get there before the morning warehouse shift, you’ll have a 1/4 mile walk from your car to your desk. You’ll be in a shared space with a handful of other techs, all fighting each other to try and hear the equipment they’re testing. When you get a moment of quiet, it’s perforated by the constant racket of pallet jacks and forklifts, because absolutely no resources went into isolating your work area from the rest of the warehouse. Have fun lying to customers when you say you conducted a noise floor test on their gear. Sales engineers are clueless, and constantly email technicians about easily searchable issues. Roughly 60% of the equipment coming in has nothing wrong with it, because no troubleshooting happened prior to the gear getting sent in. Your workflow will be interrupted daily by customers who insist their equipment is broken and demand to talk to the technician. You’ll get real good at including screenshots of the owners manual in all your emails to customers. The culture is completely different for anyone working in the warehouse vs the rest of the company. I saw coworkers who were with the company for 10+ years get canned for being tardy or calling off too often. Mandatory overtime is rare, but does happen. There is virtually no advancement opportunities for anyone in the service department, which wouldn’t be an issue if annual raises were generous or if your base salary was good in the first place. You better believe upper management will pepper you with newsletters bragging about their record profits, though. The problem with Sweetwater is that it is a sales based company, with some other cool services, that they run them on an absolute bare minimum basis. They love to advertise that they have an army of guitar techs and an electronic repair department, but loathe paying for it.
