"Let them eat cake" - Analyst Spectrum Employee Review

To start, most people are treated as hired help; their input, ideas, and anything other contributions they try to make - except for narrowly defined operational tasks - are duly rebuffed. There is no sense of entrepreneurship, pride, or thinking outside the box because these qualities are frowned upon. So, I have spent the past year and four months literally running reports and turning them in. Rinse and repeat. The benefits are a joke. I pay out the wazoo in insurance premiums, yet I have a $1,600 deductible I have to satisfy before insurance covers anything. We get 10 DAYS of vacation PER YEAR, plus 4 "floating holidays", and then only the bare minimum of bank holidays off - excluding MLK Day. Yes, one of the largest cable companies in the US does not observe MLK Day. They also REQUIRE you to come in during inclement weather - working from home is forbidden, even though we sell internet - and if you cannot come in for "personal reasons" (i.e. your road isn't plowed, the interstate is closed, and the Governor has declared a state of emergency) you have to use your paltry vacation time. Even if you do go "rogue" and work from home anyway to avoid a vacation day, they will still make you use one and not give it back to you. The ironic thing is my manager gave me a song and dance about work-life balance and how it important it is when I was interviewing. But, I have never worked for a place that is so extreme on the "work" side of the balance. The upper management who did come over from St. Louis mostly do not have families or left them there. They are in at 7 AM, leave at 8 PM and expect us all to do the same. If they had been up front about how important the optics of being in your seat for 13 hours are, I certainly wouldn't have come here. For the record, I have never been spoken to about this; it's just apparent that this is the dynamic. Some of the upper managers who made the move are incompetent, yet have immunity because they're from the "Old Guard". They have made tremendous mistakes with serious financial consequences, yet are still here. Meanwhile, people hired locally are essentially on an indefinite probationary period where they can be let go for any error. It's "Let them eat cake" for the 21st Century.