The expectations that if you aren't willing to travel non-stop or put in a ton of hours can be quite overwhelming. If you happen to get into a job where the travel is less, there will be almost no compensation after you subtract the 10 hours per pay period for overtime. Previously this was a measure to get our company back on track after a hard time for our company (we all made sacrifices), but now it's become the norm. Everytime I turn around now there one more thing where we aren't being paid for something when we used to.
There's also the threat that if you do travel a lot, if you don't get all of the forms filled out just right and approved at the right time, they tell you they won't pay for the trip and it will have to come out of your own pocket.
Training for new employees is minimal at best. Most of the time they are sent to site and told to call if they don't understand or get themselves into trouble.
Hours on the road can range from 10-18 hour days. There have been all too many trips where I've stayed up for 30 hours. Most of the time field work is minimally staffed and employees are expected to pull double duty by working double shifts on 3-4 hours of sleep. You only get paid to travel as long as you travel during normal business hours. So if you have to go to site on the day you travel, and it takes you till midnight to get home, you're only going to get paid will 5 PM EST (doesn't matter if you are in another time zone).
Unreasonable safety standards are forced upon employees "just because". You will quite often find yourself standing next to a customer who's wearing flip flops, shorts, and a t-shirt, while you are wearing steel boots, long pants, long sleeve shirt, hard hat, and safety glasses with side shields. These requirements are in place any time you are on a customer site whether OSHA would require them or not. If you complain, you are looked down upon like you are a loose cannon who's dangerous to work around. "You want to be safe, right?". Quite often HR sends out people who's sole purpose in life is to yell at you (literally) for not complying with these rules.
The new cubicles (6x7) are absolutely demoralizing. You aren't allowed to have anything above the 4 foot high walls, and there's almost no storage space whatsoever. No privacy available for those moments where you might need to look at something personal (like your pay or health insurance information which is only accessible within the company and on the company website).
The mentality that "this is better than anywhere else around" is both childish and short sighted. They claim that HR polls other companies in the area to make sure we are paid better, but quite often our new hires are given information from the Universities that that have attended tell them what they really should be making (10-20% more).
If you are good at what you do, your reward will be them dumping even more work on you.
The review process is absolutely NOT based on performance. The managers are so far removed from what you are actually doing it's almost impossible for them to objectively determine your performance and therefore not qualified to make decisions on merit increases. Quite often people are given merit increases who clearly did not deserve it and those who did got minimal or nothing.
You are encourage to take a vacation, but you have to clear it 3-6 months in advance. This makes it extremely hard to plan anything AND have it all work out.
Lack of planning on upper management's part means you will quite often find yourself being told to head to the airport on a Friday night just before you are ready to leave to go home to spend time with your family. One person even had to cancel their entire anniversary trip because a manager insisted that person be on site when there were many others that could have gone in their place. This happens more than you can imagine.
$35 a month is all you will be given for your cellphone budget, but you will be on the phone so much the $35 will never cover it.
Per diem is only $39/day no matter what the local per diem rate is (unless you are in L.A., Chicago, Boston, or N.Y. City, which is rare) AND they will subtract your breakfast portion of that per diem if they figure out the hotel you are staying at serves breakfast (even though most of the time you will have already left the hotel before they started serving breakfast).
Customers are promised entirely different things vs. what you had told was what was sold and when the customer is upset, you, not sales or a project manager, will have to work it out. Afterwards, you will be scolded for spending too much money on the project even though someone verbally approved the money to be spent.
