Verizon System Engineer reviews

Outsourcing has been a big issue, and teaching your offshore team members your job in painstakingly countless training hours to get laid off in the end is a big pill to swallow.

Everything else. The project that I was on was a disorganized mess. The company didn't know what they wanted to do with it, and it ended up getting moved from one side of the company to the other, with most people on the team getting the "find another team or get laid off" treatment. My role with this project was changed several times and I never actually did the position that I was hired for. Ultimately, I became the only member of my group, so I worked alone and remotely, which made getting anything done much harder. When I finally found a team that I fit in with and where I could really use my skill set, Verizon did another re-org and pulled the "relocate, find another team, or get laid off" thing with me and about 3000 other people, with the excuse being that they needed to "globally realign" their resources and locations. I could not relocate and the company made no effort to help me to find another team, so I was laid off. Aside from my particular experience, Verizon in general has a BAD reputation for laying people off, and it is well deserved. The regularly lay lots of people off every June and every December (yes, just before Christmas). Every employee knows this, and so everyone gets prepared to be laid off during those times. Recently, however, Verizon has started laying people off more frequently, and tends to use excuses such as the "global realignment" one above. They are also in the process of selling many of their office locations, with the intention being to close those locations down, once again using the "move or be laid off" excuse to cut their workforce. The bottom line is that if you are looking for any type of job security, Verizon is NOT the place for you. As for compensation, I have a PhD and I was started at less than $70K in an entry level position. Seriously. Granted, this was my first job out of college, but they give very little credit to higher level education, such as a PhD, as counting toward experience. Verizon likes to claim how much they care about their employees, how much they value your education, and how much they care about your personal lives outside the office, but that simply isn't true. In fact, my team is regularly forced to work on Friday nights and weekends (Saturday all day, etc.) whenever we have a new software release, without additional compensation. And here's the real kicker: in several states Verizon's service employees are union members (i.e. the people who come to your house to fix you phone/cable/Internet, the people who have to climb the telephone poles or dig up fiber to do repairs, etc.). Verizon knows that every year the union employees are going to strike, so it makes its IT people (like me and my team) travel to these other states where the union employees are striking and DO THEIR JOBS! I'm not kidding. You are forced to do training on how to climb the poles and repair lines, work in the call center, etc., and then have to go and do that while the union negotiations are taking place. Ridiculous. I think the movie "Office Space" sums it up well, and not in a cute, funny way, but in an "Oh my God, I HATE working here" kind of way.