Unitrends Support is an exhausting place to burn out - Customer Support Engineer Unitrends Employee Review

Overworked is an understatement! For over a year Unitrends Support has been critically understaffed, to the point that management is continually begging employees to arrive early, stay late, skip lunch, work Saturdays, and bring laptops home. During this time, management is preaching about maintaining a "work/life balance." Support employees have been asked not to take sick days, even the HR policies have been amended to threaten termination over use of sick time. If you work at Unitrends and get the Flu, be sure to have that approved 2 weeks in advance. Many "solutions" to the staffing issue have been attempted. At one point, Unitrends supplemented online/chat support with a 3rd party foreign company. This company lacked a fundamental understanding of Unitrends' products, and some employees lacked an understanding of the English language. Thankfully, management noticed the customer dissatisfaction and ended the contract with the 3rd party. During summer of 2015, sales did not perform as expected, a result was layoffs of 6 people In Support/installs. During this time, Unitrends continued to post Support jobs and interview candidates for the very positions they laid off. This decision was eventually regarded as an utter failure, many of the laid off employees were offered their position again. Later in 2015, the Support staff was reorganized. The initial result was that many employees were moved to different shifts, creating a larger strain on employees working in the more normal shifts. This reorganization also came with Salary increases, most employees saw a $2500 - $5000 annual increase. The catch was that Support's bonus structure was gutted, meaning many employees are making less money after getting a raise. Proper training has consistently been an issue. In 2014, Unitrends purchased a small competitor, PHD. Their staff was gutted, and Unitrends took responsibility of the product, with virtually no training (initially, about 6 L1's had a lunch & learn). Unitrends has solely supported this product for over a year, while many people in support have yet to be properly trained, however we are expected to provide expert support to our customers. Unitrends recently released Version 9.0. This is a fundamental change in the software that took 2 years to develop, and still is not complete. In many respects it is like a new product. Support was given a 1 hour "training" session; essentially this was a sales demo of the product, and provided little usually training for support. All of these issues have lead to a growing apathy on the support floor. This has two major consequences: declining customer service & attrition of employees.