WAS A Great Place To Work - Service Technician DOC Maintenance Employee Review

First, I'd like to say, the 2 reviews pinned to the top of this review page are probably HR giving the company outstanding reviews, and sponsoring said reviews so that they are the first reviews that potential employees see. I could be wrong, but those reviews read more like an advertisement than a subjective and authentic review. Secondly, if you would like an accurate review of the company, and what it's like to work as a service technician, keep reading. When I first starting working for this company, it WAS a great place to work. But since then, things have spiraled downwards. Let's start with the parts department....or lack thereof. Never in my 20+ years as a technician have I ever encountered such a flawed and dysfunctional parts supply department. This has been bad since day one of my employment. I could write a book on this alone, but let me just say, this department should be a major focal point when it comes to quality within the company, but the parts department is anything but quality. So many things need to be addressed, from wrong parts shipped, to lack of literature in which to select needed parts for repairs. I could go on and on. Second, training for technicians is pretty much non-existent (except for a select few who get trained in-house). Unless of course you count the 3 days during your first week of 'You work on this machine, this machine and this machine'. Anytime a contract is signed for a new piece of equipment, techs usually don't know about it until a service call is issued to the tech. Then the tech gets to train themselves...in front of the customer. Talk about awkward. To top it off, the literature on said equipment is buried somewhere in the most unorganized app in cyberspace. You have to find data through the search option on the app, then sort through multiple icons trying to figure out what applies to the specific piece of equipment you are working on. And that's if the literature is even in the app. There are times when you have to Google search equipment to try to find anything relevant to what you are working on and trying to learn, to help you look like less of a fool to the customer. On that same note, good luck trying to find part numbers on some of the equipment. Many a time, you have to take pics of the part you need, take measurements, estimate angles, speeds, yada yada yada, and submit that to the parts department for them to help find the part. Which usually gets kicked back to the tech to do the research....like they don't already have enough to do. Let's talk customer contracts. I'm no business expert. Just a technician. But how does someone make a business decision to prioritize a customer’s calls, that are a lower percentage of general maintenance service calls, over another customer that are a much higher percentage of general maintenance service calls? In other words, if customer B’s call comes in as an inoperative machine, that call takes priority over customer A’s service call, even though customer A’s call was was assigned first. Boggles the mind. Well, now techs really don't have to worry about that customer who was a majority of their general maintenance services calls anymore. Like we didn't see that coming. The quality of the new people they have hired seems to be dreadful. Dispatchers, DSMs, and technicians in my area all included. Not sure what exactly happened, as some of the veteran technicians are high level technicians. All in all, the job itself is not terrible. But faith in the leadership team to make good decisions for the company has waned. Lack of confidence in your executive team is not a good feeling to have when you need to put food on your table, especially when the work load is on the decline.