Pacific Gas and Electric Reviews

Pros

The company offers good pay and the work can be pretty fun, especially during the summer when there's a lot of fieldwork offered throughout California. The benefits and vacation times are also very reasonable and what you would expect for a huge utilities company.

Cons

Sometimes the work can be a bit slow and there might be times where you don't have much to do.

Advice to Senior Management

The management can be really vague at times and should have better communication as to what they are looking for in their employees.

Pros

Robust benefit package : Pension vesting eligibility at 5 years; 401K; Medical; Vacation; Sick Time; Tuition Aid and more!

Cons

Departments need to horizontally integrate and re-align by customer processes
Directors, and above, too removed from employees and work

Advice to Senior Management

Define the right outcomes rather than lecture
Build on employee's strengths - stop trying to fix weaknesses
Lead stop managing

Pros

Great benefits, good pay, good work hours.

Cons

Too many senior management layers, too dependent on outside consultants. Poor change management practices. Too much fire-fighting on urgent issues. No planning. Bureaucracy doubles the cost of most internal work.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on the core business. Replace board members with business leaders with innovation and vision. Officer compensation packages are obscene. Micro-managers in middle management are killing your potential.

Pros

Good benefits, opportunities to move around and do different jobs, lot of good people trying to do good things. Usually a good appreciation for work life balance.

Cons

Big company, easy to get lost. Lot of people higher up are afraid to make decisions so projects can move slowly because of it.

Advice to Senior Management

Forget about shareholder values and focus on the business. Stop shaking things up just because a new high paid manager has to prove they are making changes in order to get their bonuses.

Pros

They offer tuition reimbursement. Good opportunities to try differst skills.

Cons

The office is drab and gray

Advice to Senior Management

Be on top of consultants. They are not working as hard as they should.

Pros

Lots of opportunity to enhance skills. Good compensation and some great people in department to work with.

Cons

Everything is urgent and there is no longer a work life balance like there was 10 years ago.

Advice to Senior Management

Every 5 years we go from centralization of work groups to distributed. Make up your mind and stick with it, the answer is in holding people accountable and that's not really possible when are constantly changing..

Pros

lots of opportunities and growth

Cons

they recently laid off many people without giving advance notice.

Advice to Senior Management

i don't have any advice to the company.

Pros

Big name that is respected in the utility world.
Pretty good pay and benefits. Pension potential
Management is doing a good job of promoting from within.

Cons

So large that you can become a number if you don't speak up for yourself.
Must keep yourself motivated to achieve as the workplace is aging.
Safe job to retain, but can become repetitive.

Advice to Senior Management

The corporate office is doing a good job of promoting from within. This is very important to continue to push in order to retain your best and brightest. With aging employees you need to keep your young employees around with good pay, opportunities for advancement, and recognition.

Pros

Working for a public utility provides job security, and the benefits are very good. Very flexible work schedules and work/life balance.

Cons

Nobody ever leaves, which provides no career growth for younger people. Getting promoted is nearly impossible, and the amount of "process" one has to go through to get anything done is really something to marvel at.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on employee retention or your average age will always be 55.

Pros

great compensation
friendly coworkers
understanding supervisors
interesting and varied projects
satisfaction upon project completion
camaraderie
opportunities to network within the company and with its contractors
opportunities to rotate or switch between types of work once you are in
if you do great work you will be complemented

Cons

a very cyclical workload
some low level reviews can be rote and undersatisfying
sometimes work that is given to you is already behind schedule and you need to do your best to compensate for that loss
work-life balance is dependent upon the urgency and level of public scrutiny of the project

Advice to Senior Management

continue to offer interesting and varied projects for better employee satisfaction
consider increasing headcount to relieve the stress of already overloaded staff