Employee satisfaction is highly location dependent, a worker from Worcester may have a totally different experience from a worker based in the Merrimack Valley.
Depending on your feelings towards overtime, being a junior guy can be pretty terrible for a few years. You may be forced on holidays to on-call and to work overtime that others don't want. If you're a go-getter this generally isn't a problem.
I do not have this problem currently but previous jobs in the company have had very cliquey crews that are outwardly aggressive to people they don't like. It's the type of people that trades often attract, but the paycheck makes it better.
This particular job takes quite a long time to learn, and often you will do something in spurts of six months, only to not touch that same thing for three years.
This job specifically is not for the dyslexic, there is massive amounts of orders you have to take from electrical system operators that need to be followed to the T and any deviation from the way the order is given can lead to months of retraining and removal from overtime. Not to mention severe discipline.
Certain bosses can be stingy with spending money, this can be a problem when specific bosses refuse to put apprentices on overtime. This sounds like it makes sense, as you would think the apprentice isn't going to be able to do much anyway, but overtime is often spent time fixing things that have broken, troubleshooting, or taking complicated orders from dispatchers, and all these things are the bread and butter of the position.
Very average retirement plans for newer employees. Pensions have been removed from all new employees, and you will only have an average 401k to fall back on at retirement, this can be detrimental to new hires who are older.
This position only grants a CDL B, not an A which is fine if you never leave the company or this position, but if you decide after retirement you'd like to do some driving a couple days a week in a CDL vehicle, then your options are limited.
Supervisors can have serious boughts of power tripping. Generally speaking this can be handled by the union, but if they're not *technically* breaking any rules of the contract than there is nothing you can do about it. Some bosses will jam you up for very simple things, and this is totally dependent on where you are, and there's no way to know youre up the creek until you're in the canoe.
Supervisors with no knowledge in the job. Now many bosses did come from the union and know how to perform all job functions well, but many, many others do not. There is currently almost zero incentive for a union member to go into supervision. There is no management pension, and they only make ten percent more than a foreman, which sounds like a lot, until overtime is factored in, then union workers end up making more. The problem that arises with this is that now the company must hire from the outside to fill leadership roles, which means you could have someone who worked at Verizon splicing fiber optic for ten years telling you that you are doing your job poorly.
You can die here. This isn't hyperbole, and the reason safety is taken so seriously is because if you do make a mistake and somehow touch energized lines, there is a huge chance that you will die, and if you don't, you will most likely be horribly burned and scarred. Take it slow.
I know Iisted a lot of cons, but I plan to stay here until I'm retired or dead. Preferably the former.
