Pacific Gas and Electric Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – The people on my team are great to work with
Great benefits--you pay only 7 percent of benefit costs and they have a pension

Cons – Not much recognition
My department is not staffed to up with the work
You make one mistake and you can never overcome it

Advice to Senior Management – Open and honest communication is not valued
Leaders need to do a better job of setting expectations and giving feedback

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Plenty of opportunities to change the current processes
Recognition for good work (if you make sure people know you're doing good work) through extra bonuses in your paycheck and fast promotion process
Some flexibility in the creativeness of your design (there's still an opportunity to improve here, but it is getting better every day)
Employee Engagement initiative is attempting to get employee's concerns heard to the upper management
Training opportunities are easily and painlessly approved (within reason of course!) Training budget is often underutilized.
Often get to go to events such as Oracle Open World
Many opportunities to exercise leadership skills even if you're not a supervisor (build lead on projects, etc)
Senior and Middle Management is approachable
Great location, right next to BART!

Cons – Very thin line between operations and development in my specific area. Programmers are on-call 24x7 whereas Operations only works from 8 AM to 8 PM and is not expected to recover jobs without the programmer's intervention (even for a simple failed file transfer due to network issues.) If it's a known issue and the recovery is documented, why get the programmer involved when he/she has a deadline on a project to meet?

Programmers who work on projects are then expected to maintain those programs after they go live instead of transitioning them to the support group as most IT shops do. Other parts of the IT organization have this balanced well but there is an opportunity to fix this issue for our specific reporting group.

Programmers tend to focus on their one area and refuse to let others learn their area as well. I think this is a holdover from the old culture before our most current re-org. It will remain a problem until people stop getting rewarded for knowing one, and only one, system.

Advice to Senior Management – Work to remove the blurred lines between developers and operations. Leverage best practices that have been set by the industry and other IT organizations within the company to achieve this goal.

The attempts to make our company's processes simpler are working. Keep at it! There's still a lot to tackle.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than a year

Pros – Good benefits: 401k matching of 75% for up to 6% of salary; great leadership and career growth opportunities

Cons – bureaucratic. lots of levels of management and slow to make decisions.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time

Pros – Wonderful Company to work for.

Cons – No negative comments about the company

Advice to Senior Management – Learn the Star Model

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – None, terrible company that does business as a monopoly!

Cons – Company that does not value diversity!

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Not very aggressive culture at PG&E

Cons – average pay. slow promotions . many lateral moves

Advice to Senior Management – Give employees more autonoly

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than a year

Pros – Static environment, degree of stability.

Cons – Couldn't recommend this company to anyone, particularly not fellow alumnus.

Advice to Senior Management – Break the company up into smaller units

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Pacific Gas and Electric as a contractor for less than a year

Pros – Nice people if you are an employee. Great if you are a minority. Promote from within.

Cons – Heavy use of but yet distrust of contractors built into culture. Disorganized. In their quest to hire minorities, they've left quality behind to some degree. Some bad management not managing to top notch corperate standards.

Advice to Senior Management – Focus on integrity and adhereance to corperate standards and norms.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time

Pros – Opportunity to work on interesting renewable policy challenges.

Cons – For a large company not as many opportunities as it's too bureaucratic.

Advice to Senior Management – Articulate more opportunities to rank and file employees who are dedicated and driven.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Pacific Gas and Electric as an intern for less than a year

Pros – Friendly department staff, helpful management, good IT support, community outreach and events, safety is taken seriously here and I appreciate it. They do ergo-assessments at your desk which is awesome! I felt like I fit in and I liked the face-passed environment.

Cons – Human resources department is slow to process requests and was not professional. The website does not work with macs or certain browsers which makes things difficult.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend