Profitable company that forgot its roots - growing pains and internal issues
Pros
Friendly, talented co-workers, marginal opportunities to grow, looks good on resume so easy to get recruited when a more promising opportunity comes along, paychecks ontime every two weeks. Highly profitable, but that's all that matters to them now.
Cons
Zero new engineer on boarding. If you are not billing on your timesheet your first week St. Cloud will get suspicious and phone your manager to ask why your utilization rate is so low. From then on your are literally on your own, fixing systems you have never seen before and are not certified in. Satellite offices feel unimportant and overlooked by St. Cloud with little support, even for critical things like service vans. This is not a problem if you are in St. Cloud Engineers have both the R2W (revenue to wage) and Utilization Rates to track how they are doing. These systems ensure the company makes back not only your salary, but guarantees a certain amount of profit. These systems are heavily stacked against techs. Any training, especially required product certification training, counts against your R2W and Utilization numbers. Once your annual review rolls around they'll go over how not very high your numbers are and tell you improvement is needed, there will always be leverage at ever review for a need of vast improvement. No matter how high of a percentage billable your time is, unless you get a lot of projects it can be hard to achieve above the required R2W goal. Throw in any days off and you'll be working off a R2W debt all year. There are bonuses if you get R2W above 2.5, but the bonuses definitely don't cover what you would have gotten in overtime by then. Endless growth and no hiring of more engineers - this is leading to longer wait times for customers and a complete grind for some of the techs. Endless supply of extra work and requests to do work off hours, but no incentive with which to do it. There is no overtime and no bonuses for extra work. If you are on-call for an entire week, you get a measly 4 hours PTO or a $100 cash bonus. Marco used to have a neat employee-owned culture, but now we're all just R2W numbers being monitored by the accountants, reporting to the wealthy investors.
