Pros

- You will have the opportunity to try out several different positions within the company, providing you experience with a range of different peoples, corporate environments, and technologies.

- Depending on what position you hold, you will probably find yourself in a casual, familiar, close-knit working environment. If you are competent, you will form quick friendships with the other competent people who occasionally grace the company. If you're NOT competent, you will probably enjoy playing video games and drinking with the many other people like you who work there.

- They do have benefits (health/dental/vision insurance, 401(k), etc.). I can't speak to how great they are, but they're definitely there.

- Things are pretty flexible. They are usually willing to work with you if you have child-care issues, school commitments, family engagements, and so on.

- They do at least try to instill some sense of community. The company organizes team sports and other group activities and they offer community-service opportunities.

Cons

- The company is VERY poorly managed. There is little to no communication between different teams, there are frequently misunderstandings about benefits, and the people in charge of empowering the grunt workers are the least qualified for the job. Decisions that affect the core everyday business are made by people so far removed from that aspect of the company that they have no concept of what they're really doing. Budgets for the different teams are confusing and frequently too small.

- The company has no concept of priorities or focus. People who are good at their jobs but have made a few mistakes like having minor attendance issues are dismissed, while others who are outrageously incompetent and should never have been hired in the first place are let to stay on and on and on and on.... Management is constantly looking for solutions to problems that don't exist, while outright ignoring those that clearly do.

- Equipment provided is of poor quality (with only a few exceptions). Most of the computers are old and slow, to the point where it directly impacts the work being done. Small, cheap accessories like optical mouses are hard to come by. Even the furniture is shoddy, with broken chairs and desks being quite common.

- Competence and ability have no value. Anybody who can tell the recruiter what "RAM" is or how to save a Word document can get hired, and someone being let go because they're later found to be technically unskilled is an incredibly rare, almost nonexistent, occurrence. Training and documentation are also totally inadequate, which only exacerbates this problem.

- Pay is far below the market average.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees! Obviously you can't run the entire company based on the gripes of the "lower-level" workers, but their input surely should be considered. When you have the entire body of technicians complaining about the same things over and over and over and over, it is a clear sign that something is broken.

Also, pay more, or offer incentives for more skilled technicians. Paying $15 an hour instead of $11 might sound more expensive, until you consider that if you were hiring people who were actually WORTH $15, you would be paying LESS of them.