You are valued if you are a part of the technical staff. If you are support staff you are treated as secondary. In messaging, Arup talks about teamwork and we are all a part of the team but in reality the engineering staff gets all the support, time, resources, development and money. You will feel how you are treated very differently (and not a part of the team at all) when you are not an engineer, no matter what other key skills you are bringing to the table. The difference in pay is already there to provide a clear difference between technical and support staff. It does not need to be reinforced in day to day treatment. Employees of all types should be valued for the work they provide. An engineer led company like this values engineers only (forget HR, IT, marketing, legal, managers or administrators).
Leadership falls short every time, they try and say nice things and make us feel warm and fuzzy but rarely follow through. They leave middle managers abandoned to deal with heavy lifting on their own, not taking seriously the issues around retention and needs for process improvements.
