For the past three months I have been working for an IT support company that is part of a larger country-wide franchise. The office is relatively small; typically only 5-6 people in the office at a time plus a few remote employees. I began to notice issues as soon as I was hired on, and honesty should have seen the HUGE red flags before I started. I applied for the job with no previous experience, and minimal education yet was hired the same day. The co-owner mentioned that they were a small team, and had been struggling to keep employees. At that point I didn’t really read into it because I felt lucky to get any job offers at all.
My first week on the job was simple enough, they hired me as a workstation deployment specialist so I mainly handle setting up new computers for our clients. They had one other part-time hardware tech show me the basics of getting Windows and our company software installed. Then very quickly I was no longer being given any training. They started sending me to on-site appointments by myself, with little information on what to expect from our clients. We handle many offices located all over town, and each has their own software and hardware infrastructure. Some setups are documented well, but for the most part I’m left to figure it out as I go. So I would often show up to do what I thought would be a simple job only to find out they have all of these other needs and complex issues, and I had no resources to pull from. All this leads to time wasted not working on other builds.
Most other employees at the office are always on calls with users handling support issues, so whenever I have questions or need help, I have to wait for one of them to be available. And while I struggle to learn the convoluted processes of building computers for each individual client, more builds start piling on top of me. The part-time hardware tech has been showing up less and less, so I’m left to do nearly all the work for deploying new workstations.
We’ve had one higher tier technician supervising us, and he has been the best resource I’ve had. He’s been at the job for a few years, and because of the high turnover, he’s the longest standing employee that we can regularly interact with. Recently however, one of the co-owners who works remote-only decided to move him into a project management role, working with clients on larger scale items. So he is no longer our supervisor, and we’ve been directed to send messages to the remote co-owner with questions and concerns. For obvious reasons, he is slow to answer in situations where time is critical. In fact, those of us at the low end of the chain hardly see any of upper management at all. We show up at the office, begin working and have to wonder when or if we will see any of our management staff, and how long they will stay.
I’m not the only one experiencing a heavy workload either, all of the technicians who handle ticket queues have expressed how incredibly difficult it is to manage the flow of tickets that continue to pour in each day. Between four people, there were two days in a row in which they resolved over 200 tickets. That’s 50 tickets a person. And despite the lack of employees, support from management, and daily swarm of tickets, our co-owners consistently make decisions to onboard more clients. It seems like we’re onboarding someone new every week.
They keep track of the ticket flow, and we try to have daily check-ins to manage some of the overdue tickets in the queue, so they can obviously see that we’re falling behind. Yet no one says anything, management continues to push company growth, and the technicians just keep their heads down and try to slough through as many tickets as they can. I personally can’t tolerate this environment much longer. I see more builds come from nowhere without context or documentation, and no instruction from my supervisors except when I’m told suddenly to start certain builds right away, and make them top priority despite other deadlines coming up. The tickets are piling up, my coworkers can’t help me, and upper management seems to be outright neglecting the obvious problems that plague the low level departments. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.