Most of you who read the current ecobee reviews on Glassdoor see that many of the negative reviews were posted by Technical Support Representatives, which makes you think “it’s probably just their technical support department that is really bad, the rest of the company must be much better”. I’m sorry to break it to you though, but that’s not the case. This is coming from someone who worked in the technical support department and then had the “fortune” of moving up to a position with the core product team.
Let’s start with the first part of my journey at this ridiculous company. The reason I decided to join ecobee as a technical support representative was because I thought it would be a solid “foot in the door”. If I worked hard, showed what I’m capable of and made connections with the core product team, I will be able to move up into a position that more suits my educational background. Not to my surprise, that’s the plan ~85% of people who joined the technical support team had in mind. I’ve never in my life expected to see so many highly educated and talented people work in technical support. You name the degree and you’ll find someone in that department that holds it. I’m talking engineers, software developers, UX/UI designers, user researchers and technical writers just to name a few.
You might be asking, does this plan work? Can you truly join the technical support team then move up to a more suitable position? My answer to that would be, maybe, but most likely no. Every now and then the company opens an internal position targeted specifically towards the technical support team and the talent that it holds. However, more than often these positions are only temporary. It could be as short as a month or if you’re lucky, 4-5 months long. The reason these positions are only temporary is because the company is looking for cheap labor. They have some tasks that need to be completed but are not looking to hire someone full-time for them or even hire someone externally on a contract. Since there’s so much talent in the technical support department, why not hire someone from there and keep their super low salary the same? It’s a win-win situation. We save money and we let these desperate technical support reps have a taste of what’s it’s like to have a real job. To make things worse though, as soon as you land this temporary position, the technical support managers immediate go into a “We must bring this person back, we can’t lose them for too long. We need more people on the phones ASAP” mode. This push back from the technical support managers causes your chances of extending this temporary role to become ridiculously slim. So long story short, if you’re joining the technical support department in hopes of moving up to a better position permanently, I’m sorry to tell you it will most likely not happen.
With regards to what’s it like working in the technical support department, I could probably write a book about how bad it is. Many of the reviews on here already covered this so I will not go into too much details about it, but here’s lil summary:
You will experience micromanagement at an extreme level that could almost feel illegal. You were on a call for 2 hours with a difficult customer and now that you’re finally off want to take a short 5-minute break? Sorry mate, we can’t afford to have someone off the phones at this moment. We value our customers who paid $350 for a “smart” thermostat more than we’ll ever value you, peasant. Now take the next call before we have a sit-down with you and threaten to fire you.
Speaking of firing. Your job is never secure. The department goes through occasional firing purges for god knows what reasons. The last one I witnessed was the firing of 8 people of the same ethnicity (spoiler alert, they were not Caucasian). My pleads to management to provide me with a valid reason to why this happened fell on deaf ears. To this day I’m still in complete shock that they got away with pulling such a move. I’m certain if one of these employees who got fired had the money and time, they would have sued the hell out of ecobee for this. This was the bluntest workplace discrimination that I’ve ever witnessed, and I doubt that I will see this happen anywhere else in the 21st century.
The scheduling is horrendous. The rotation is weekly and extremely randomized, one week you could be working 4PM – Midnight, Tuesday to Saturday and the following week you’d have to work 8AM – 4PM, Monday to Friday, which means not only you will get 1 day off before the transition, but you will also have to start waking up extremely early for the morning shift while you were used to sleeping in the week before because you had the night shift. This bad scheduling could easily cause you to get 6 days off every 4 weeks instead of the usual 8 days off. This bad scheduling also means that you can’t plan ahead because you don’t know what your schedule will look like. Planning on going to a concert or a sports event? Well buy the ticket then hope that on that day you will be off or that someone will be willing to swap the day with you.
On top of the bad scheduling, the workload is ridiculous. Calls are non-stop and email tickets come in by the butt-load. The reason the department gets so many support calls and emails is because quite frankly, the products they sell are not good. There’s always an issue with the software, either that of the products themselves or their mobile app. Hardware failures are also quite a common issue because the products were poorly designed. The server also constantly goes down causing these "smart" home electronics to be unavailable online and hence cause a flood of support calls to come in. Another reason is that people don't stay for too long. The turnover rate at this company and specifically the technical support department is one of the highest I've ever witnessed, but it's for very valid reasons.
Since the call volume is ridiculous, the technical support management team had a great idea (I'm being sarcastic btw) to reduce the workload on call agents. They hand picked "the top performers" and placed them on a special team called the Email Support Team which is responsible for only handling the emails that come in. The team is segregated from the rest of the department for being considered the best and receives special treatment like reasonable work hours and days off.
A big reason for having a team for email support was so call agents don’t have to do emails while simultaneously being on calls, except that’s not the case. supervisors continued to secretly assign all the call agents emails, and then congratulated the email support team for lowering the unassigned emails folder. Senior agents can’t get on the special email support team unless they do months and months of "email support trials" where they get 45 emails from the unassigned folder while simultaneously being on calls in order to get the chance to be on this special team. However, this hand picked people didn’t have to go through any trials. The team is run by 2 supervisors, so they picked their favorites. They picked their sibling, their childhood friend, and one of their closest friends to be on the team.
Management are some of the most obnoxious, self-centered, and useless people I’ve ever met in my life. They’re the reason why the department is so toxic and why 99% of all agents are miserable. They don’t listen to ANY feedback and are living in their own happy bubble which from it everything in the department is working smoothly. But it’s not. The department is slowly imploding and when the company finally realizes this it will be too late.
If you want to move up within the technical support department itself, then be prepared to become an expert management adulator because that’s the only way you could achieve this. Most of those who move up are extremely incompetent people but are admired by management because they don't show any resistance to management's inhumane way of running the department. In some occasions management even goes to the extent of promoting their favorites secretly without advertising a position so that everyone could apply for it equally.
So in conclusion, if you want to work at ecobee technical support, then have the lowest expectations possible with regards to moving up and out of the department, be prepared to experience micromanagement at an extreme level, forget about your social life because the disgusting scheduling will never permit you to have one, get ready to deal with highly incompetent managers and team leads/supervisors/trainers, and finally prepare mentally every day to deal with the worst customers a company could ever have.
Now, we move on to the second part of my journey. This is when I got the “break” and moved out from the department to work with the core product team.
When I received the news that I got the job, I felt extremely ecstatic. My plan worked! I survived the ecobee technical support hell-hole and now can finally do work that I care about. Work that relates to what I went to school for.
This happy feeling quickly dissipated when on my first day I realized that my new managers did not have anything prepared for me to do. Any competent manager would have a plan for a new employee to ease them into the role. A list of tasks that would familiarize the person with the department, product, and type of work they can expect themselves to be doing on the long run. Not me though. They sat me on a desk, gave me a laptop, and asked me to go through some online documents about the product which they know I have already extensively gone through and that’s how I aced the interview. This went on for a whole week. For a whole week I did nothing except sit at my desk and read over documents that I already read 10s of times.
Our 1-on1s in this first week were useless and vague. I got the clear impression that the department is not ready for the work I was hired to do because the product is experiencing some “hiccups”. That’s fine I said. I’m a highly educated person with a portfolio that showcases what I’m capable of and you guys know this and that’s why you hired me. Let me assist the department in other ways until I can do the actual work I was hired to do. This fell on deaf ears and I continued to sit at my desk with no work to do for a few more weeks.
As you can imagine by now, I was feeling quite useless, miserable and defeated. I wake up in the morning to go to a job in which I can’t do anything; and my efforts to get involved elsewhere were constantly ignored. I was feeling extremely uneasy because I was getting paid to do nothing of value to the company.
Thankfully this did not continue for too long, slowly the product was ready for me to do to the work I was hired to do. Good thing my expectations were rock-bottom low by this time, so I wasn’t too surprised when I saw how useless the work I must do was. Work that in my opinion will not improve the product in any way but is rather a waste of time and money (and I mean a lot of money).
Joining the core product team made me realize how bad this company is at handling their money. I saw the managers spend thousands and thousands of dollars on useless things for “testing purposes to improve customer experience”. There are also many employees that really didn’t have a purpose and were there simply because the company can afford them. Until I left the company, I still had now idea what one of our directors did. Throughout the time I spent in this role all I saw him do was sit at his desk and stare at his phone for hours. How possible is it that this person works from their phone?
The company also hires many co-ops to do useless work simply because they can. My team hired a co-op to design a future concept of the current product we were working on. This was so ridiculous to me because 1. The product we already have on the market is extremely bad and is doing terrible, and 2. The “updated” products we were working on were not making any progress at all. WHY, WHY WOULD YOU WORK ON A FUTURE CONCEPT IF YOU CAN’T EVEN FINISH THE CURRENT PRODUCT YOU’RE WORKING ON??????
Anyways, I continued to do useless work as I saw the product they’ve been working on for years and spent millions of dollars on fail miserably time and time again. I knew its demise was inevitable because of how incompetent this company is as a “smart” electronics product company. They aim way too high and had a little too much money from investors in their pockets which they love to spend.
I was so miserable at this company that I was happy when my contract was over and decided to leave instead of going back to the technical support team.
Now a few months later after I left the company, I got the news that ecobee had to let go of 10% of their employees without any notice due to covid-19. I wasn’t surprised at all. They waste so much money on useless things and executive level employees that they can’t afford to keep paying everyone’s salary if a minor hiccup like a drop in sales happens.
Do you really want to work for such a volatile company that doesn’t seem capable of doing anything right? The decision is all yours.
