DISH Employee Review

I have been working at DISH full-time for more than a year

Pros – Van, Tools, Training and Uniform provided. No personal investment required (think contractors). Enjoyable to work outdoors. Like any job, I'll miss the people I worked with.

Cons – I started working for Dish with a can-do, carpe diem, make your own opportunities work ethic, and left downtrodden and cynical 18 months later.
Without exaggeration, in an office of about 20 technicians, an average of one and a half technicians left for every month I worked there. We were hired to work 4x10 shifts, but it was very rare to work less than 12 hours. As we started to lose techs faster than we hired them, one or two days of mandatory overtime a week was the norm. Yes, we were paid, but it was mandatory and usually imposed right before the end of the work week. You made plans for the weekend a month ago? Too bad. You hardly ever spend time with friends or family because you're desperate to hold on to your $14/hour job? Take it or leave it. This multibillion dollar company won't risk one penny of its share value to improve working conditions.
The most important tools used to evaluate your job performance were QAS (quality assurance inspections) and the dreaded metrics. If you fail a single QAS within three months of the last failure, you are ineligible for promotion or any raises. This would actually be reasonable if you were being judged on brand new installs at single family homes in the suburbs. However, not only were we usually tested on triplexes and MDUs in the city where it is impossible, IMPOSSIBLE to do a standard install, but we were held to the same standard for trouble calls, which we were expected to complete within one hour. Did the installer practically destroy the house three years ago? Will it take 3 hours to fix? Too bad, all the other techs have their own ridiculous routes to worry about and you're responsible. At least you can keep your job, though.
With metrics, your job was constantly at stake and numerous techs were fired by nameless middle managers with access to spreadsheets with our numbers. Thinking that he was coming in for mandatory overtime, one tech was called in on his day off only to discover someone had ordered his termination. The metrics included job completion rate, 12 day trouble call rate, and customer survey score. They were largely out of our control and impossible to dispute.
I'm against unions in general, but I felt so angry and desperate most of the time, I would have risked my job to join one. I really felt like I had nothing to lose towards the end.

Advice to Senior Management – What is there to say when the CEO responds to legitimate and overwhelmingly negative criticism from rank and file employees by saying there are worse places to work? Where's the concern? The economy is improving and your best employees will not forget how they were treated when they had nowhere else to go. Dish will never again go through a period of adding a million customers a year, and it needs to give a little back (money, benefits, humane working conditions) to its employees if it wants to hang on to the customers it already has. Instead, it has taken a near-sighted approach of extreme cost cutting, and substituting good, local, common sense management with a distant, manage by numbers approach.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend