Pros
There are a lot of pros to working as a support engineer here. For starters, you get exposed to a wide range of technologies and get to work with others you haven't had much of an opportunity to. It really does exponentially grow your experience in the I.T. field. You touch so much different tech you feel like you could handle almost anything after this job. Everyday feels new, and I literally was never bored at work. In fact, days flew by due to the work load. There's also free snacks/sodas, a coffee machine, and sometimes management brings in lunch. Wednesdays are catered breakfast from either Chic-Fil-A, Panera Bread, Lizard's Thicket or Jason's Deli. Solving a hard case is the best feeling in the world, especially when you know the customer is satisfied and thankful for your work.
Cons
I felt the training I received was largely inadequate given the responsibilities given to me as a Customer Support Engineer. Management has even openly admitted to training being horrid and recently took steps to improve this by having two mandatory 1hr training sessions every week. This has only gone on for a month or so now, but I was working here 3-4 months before they said anything about training being bad and I was thrown on the phones without the correct education on the proprietary Unitrends software. Which is fine, I'm a quick learner, but only if the correct documentation is available for me to research. The admin guide and their internal knowledge base only go so far in helping. I was not given access to anything else like Gira, to assist my troubleshooting, even after I requested it. The training is just a blanket overview of what Unitrends does. I worked maybe 2 labs before I started taking cases officially, but those labs were either unreliable (sometimes they were up, sometimes not) or they didn't really cover actual problems our customers run into. It's frustrating when you know what the error is, but can't find any kind of guidance on how to fix it yourself. Or, worse, whatever you do find is outdated/leads to a broken link. Management took note of this, and finally was looking to also give out free Unitrends appliances for their engineers to get used to and get better with. I even requested one and told I was going to receive one. Then I got fired. For what? Numbers. Why were my numbers down? Training. I don't feel like I was appropriately armed to handle what they expected me to. After me being there for 5 months, I finally had a pseudo job eval. My case queue was high -- maybe 55 cases, so every morning I was sitting down with management to discuss this. At no point did they ever mention my job was on the line, either. I ended up getting my backlog down to 19 cases after being over backwards and was let go without notice. Another con to be aware of is the mental drain. If you work 8-5, you will never, ever get off on time which greatly affects you handling personal things in your life. Not knowing when you're getting off work means you can't plan out anything or set appointments. So, what happens is, if you do take a day off, other engineers have to take your case. The problem is, if I'm already drowning in cases, adding somebody else's makes me that much more behind on my stuff. Support is ridiculously short staffed (and minus one with me gone) and you'll have to be okay with taking a severity 1 call (as in customer's system is down) at 4:45 or even at 5:30 if you're still there just trying to get to a stopping point to leave. Work/Life balance gets thrown out of whack here, more so than any other job I've had. I literally was working all the time, even at home. And if I wasn't working, I'd be sitting on my couch on a Saturday thinking about working. I wouldn't call it drinking the kool-aid, but if you're there long enough, you just adopt this ridiculous work ethic that's damaging if you have other things to take care of in life. I was taking my laptop home on weekends, getting up early before work to catch up, and just killing myself to stay afloat. You'd get ahead for a day and you're buried again the next. It's extremely discouraging and stressful. I was doing this off the clock, too (I was contracted) just to get ahead. I didn't care about the money, I cared about lowering my stress level. There's also a disconnect between departments. Sales never knows what support is doing, support never knows what cloud is doing, and basically everyone is just doing their own thing for the most part. This has been addressed while I was there, but the complete segregation of departments slows things down and made things frustrating to deal with. In June, there was an issue affecting all Cloud customers. Trying to get an answer out of Cloud in terms of what was going on was like pulling teeth. Meanwhile, I have about 5 customers who pay good money to use the cloud, barking at me because it's not functional and I can't get an update beyond "it's down". Literally, I made a CloudOps case asking for a formal explanation of what's going on (since we did not send out a notice of maintenance.. um, what?!) and CloudOps got back to me saying "It's down, check the dashboard for status", closed the case, and left me out to dry. That's not what I wanted, nor is it what the customer wanted, so I was stuck with an angry customer because nobody at this place wanted to write this guy an incident report that would have taken literally 5 minutes to do. Lastly, this job is stupidly fast paced. It's like running backwards on the interstate in the rain and trying not to slip or get ran over by a car going 90mph. If your case queue is over 25 you're going to get ran over. Anything over 50 you're going to be roadkill real quick.
