Southern California Edison Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Southern California Edison full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Benefits / flex-work hours / cafe. on site

Cons – Too many useless. high paid people in IT, specially in Architecture. Company is going to out-source IT but keep the useless architectures. After laid-off and people leaving .. no back-fill

Advice to Senior Management – Stop asking why nothing get DONE when you laid-off people and no back-fill

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Southern California Edison full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Decent salary (industry standard) and benefits. This may change if the company is sold.

Cons – The rumor is that the company will get sold in the next few years. This is the only explanation for bringing in Baine for the latest round of lay-offs. Lay-offs have included managers with decades of experience, leaving behind gaps in expertise that cannot be covered. SCE may also be trying to cover for expensive blunders at SONGS and with Edison Mission Energy. Employees are being stretched extremely thin and workloads are increasing exponentially. The company gives lip service to safety and employee satisfaction but the management style is paranoid. Slip-ups by management tend to be blamed on line employees. The situation for union workers is much better.

Advice to Senior Management – Realize that the recent management changes have not resulted in positive changes to the company. The work gets done by line employees who are being squeezed to produce more work in less time. There is only so much work that staff employees can do without the resources they need. Lay-offs are not the answer.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Southern California Edison full-time for less than a year

Pros – Many high achieving, high performing, all-around good people.

Cons – Reorganizations are the norm, so people are in a constant state of uncertainty. Heavy workloads. Almost no work-life balance. Title-driven organization with too many layers.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Southern California Edison full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Good opportunities were there. Although people are not used to working typically in the company, if you want to contribute there was scope to learn and do what you want. Good benefits.

Cons – Going through reorgs and downsizing right now. Lack of ethics and values especially in senior management trying to keep their positions and their favourites, blaming and deceiving employees to set them up and push them out, keeping consultants on payroll. Network based. No growth.

Advice to Senior Management – Stand by your good performing people that you brought on to do the work and recognize them, thats true leadership and thats what pays off. Being humane is more than just talking about it, takes courage and humility. Don't discriminate for your favourites, ignoring their faults, and blaming it on unsuspecting employees making them helpless. You say feedback and concerns are addressed and encouraged but in the end thats just to make it career limiting and string people along and retaliate against them.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Southern California Edison full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Salary and benefits are competitive.

Cons – Inefficient processes and redtape are often frustrating and make it difficult to get things done. Everything is considered a fire drill. Management only look out for themselves, often promoting abusive and unethical managers to directors and VPs. Strong individuals are often not recognized for their talents. Older employees are often retired-in-place, dead weight waiting around for a retirement package.

Advice to Senior Management – Eliminate unneccesary layers, let lower-level management make decisions, recognize talent and promote promising individuals, and for the love of god...stop protecting (and promoting) unethical management. You would earn a lot of respect from your employees if you took a stand and got rid of bad management.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Southern California Edison

Pros – - Stable
- Competitive salary
- Great benefits
- Strong commitment to safety
- Some opportunities for training
- Semi commitment to ethics

Cons – - Impossible to get a promotion unless you are part of the good old boys club, belonging to a certain religious or ethnic group, or a relative
- Micro managers
- Top heavy, 4 chiefs for every 1 Indian
- Work Life balance is a lie

Advice to Senior Management – The workforce has moved into the 21st century, so should you and your thinking

Current Employee – been working at Southern California Edison

Pros – stable industry not suffering from economic crisis, job for life, great benefits and work and home life is well balanced. Lot's of locations to work within So Cal.

Cons – management are micro managers, NO sense of team building and mentoring. You will be ask to spend as much money as you can in one year, just to meet yearly budget, even if the rate payer (all of us) pays the bill.

Advice to Senior Management – try hiring management within the department and or in line promotion. Avoid bringing in your buddies and ex-coworkers from the old Nuclear plant.
Do what is right for the rate payer, not your performance bonus. Trying push a project through before the end of year just to meet corporate goal should not be allowed if Safety and compliance will be at risk. Share holders should be 2nd place in the priority, not the public.

Former Employee – worked at Southern California Edison

Pros – Good benefits e.g. medical, dental, vision, vacation and 401k. Pay is pretty good in the beginning.A lot of different jobs available.

Cons – Bad management, over paid management, this creates an elitist attitude towards rank and file employees. Managers cover a lot of mistakes up. Managers rarely possess the education or skills necessary to preform job effectively. Many people are promoted to mangers who have been total screw ups in previous job, but are promoted by inside connections or brownnosing. A supervisor who lied to the NRC was then promoted to a manager position. This was done even after the NRC recommended they terminate his employment. They promoted him in order to make it look like he was not part of the problem any longer.

Advice to Senior Management – Look at the core competencies (education, experience ect,ect) of many manger positions and compare them with the many of the current managers and you will find a lot of managers should not be in their positions. That’s why SONGS is at INPO 4.SONGS is a chilled work environment.

Current Employee – been working at Southern California Edison

Pros – Good salary and benefits package. Excellent job security (they're not exactly going out of business - it's the second-largest electrical utility in the U.S.).

Cons – A stodgy, top-down company culture in which the manager is king and his authority goes unchecked. Independent thinking is discouraged here - anyone who suggests something new or doesn't conform to the thinking of the department as a whole is looked upon as "difficult to work with" or negative.

SCE is stuck in a 1950s mind-set, mainly because a large percentage of the employee population has been with the company for decades, and old habits die hard. This is a dark, negative place to work in which employees talk the talk but don't walk the walk, and company values are just words on paper.

There's a reason why SCE offers such a generous compensation package: the company culture would drive away employees, and it's easier to keep them with high salaries than it is to fix the problem.

Advice to Senior Management – Resign. We need some fresh, young, progressive-minded leaders. This is 2010, not 1955! A revolution needs to happen.

Current Employee – been working at Southern California Edison

Pros – Great place if you want stability, offers great benefits and profit participation. Depending on management, can be a great place to work. Depending on your work group, opportunities for growth. Once you're hired by the company, you're practically guaranteed lifetime employment as company is reluctant to fire people with known workplace problems.

Cons – * 18 month residency rule--you must be in your current position for 18 months before you can apply for other jobs. Even if you get promoted, this resets your 18 month clock. I've seen management promote people just so they don't transfer out after their residency ends (tip: you can turn down promotions).
* Uneven promotion criteria. I've seen people get promoted who don't even meet the criteria outlined by the Manager 3 of what it took for promotion (none of the promoted met the criteria).
* Lack of qualified managers or management training. For example Cost Estimating is being run by an MBA grad a couple years out of business school who said he wanted to make employees happy, wanted to focus on career development, wanted a work environment based on respect and teamwork; but has made decisions and changes that proved quite the contrary.
* Very bureaucratic company. Lack of teamwork. I agree with the reviewer if there was an open market, SCE would be very slow to make necessary changes. Right now, it's an overbloated company. Seems like more managers and employees are hired to fuel bureaucratic needs (i.e. managers hired to coordinate expectations and requests between two work groups).
* Bad hiring decisions. I've seen managers with hardly any applicable experience and no people skills being hired. For example the managers running TDBU Cost Estimating have no actual cost estimating experience and haven't even gone through the process of estimating a project. They make major changes without even consulting existing employee.
* Too many employees close to retirement who are just phoning it in. Seriously, this is a drag on morale as younger people are picking up the slack.

Advice to Senior Management – More two-way communication between management and employees. There should be something that allows employees to provide feedback about management. This would greatly address many workplace issues.
More management accountability when it comes to workplace issues
Don't be afraid to fire people for fear of lawsuits