Pros
The other techs are very nice and it's easy to make friends. The work itself is also interesting and often fun, plus there's no customer interaction and you can listen to music or a podcast/audiobook while you work. If this job paid well and wasn't being run into the ground by management, I would have stayed here forever.
Cons
The owners of the company and members of upper management have no idea how any of the actual work that keeps the company running is performed, and they have no respect for the people who do that work. Some examples: Techs are held to unrealistic speed standards that are set by people who have no idea how to do our jobs. We have to track every single minute of our shift so that upper management can see if we meet these standards. Management acts as if these numbers are a direct result of how much effort you put in, but they actually reflect the quality of the material you happen to be working with that day. The numbers are checked every day, and there isn’t any understanding if you have a low day once in a while - even one day of low numbers can result in a warning email. This pressure really affects the quality of the work. Techs who consistently make mistakes that the rest of us have to spend time fixing have been specifically commended by management for their performance just because they are fast. Most of us genuinely want to deliver the quality that the company promises, and knowing that we'll get punished for taking the time to do that is terrible for morale. Management periodically decides to overhaul things that the techs use every day without thinking about whether it will make our jobs harder. Most recently, it was the spreadsheet template that we work with for every single job. They completely redesigned it so that they could automate some of the work, because they were convinced that it would make things faster. What it actually did is make the spreadsheet practically unreadable and introduce a ton of new problems. Techs were not consulted at all during the development phase, and when we gave feedback after the rollout, it was ignored. To make matters worse, management had not even finished building it before they made us start using it, so we had to do all of our work in a half-functioning spreadsheet for weeks. There are speakers on the production floor that used to be controlled by the assistant managers that work on the floor. But then the owner got the idea that if certain music was played, it would make us work faster. First, they took control of the playlist away from the floor managers. They played music that we didn’t like, but it was bearable, because we could always go to the speaker and turn the volume down. But then they told us that we are not allowed to touch the speakers under any circumstance, and any time they suspected we had, they would chastise us at the team standup. Now we have to constantly listen to terrible music that is played so loudly it drowns out anything you try to play in your own headphones. The very few techs who work here for more than a couple of years are not compensated for their loyalty or experience. In fact, one of our techs found out that after over five years of working here, he was being paid LESS than new hires, and had to fight management just to get 19 dollars an hour - ONE DOLLAR more than new hires that he helps train. Scheduling used to be very flexible, but new restrictions have been steadily put in place for a while. Now a weekend shift is required at least every other week, and new hires are being forced into very late shifts, like 1PM to 9PM. Upper management has even sent out an email asking if anyone wants to work OVERNIGHT shifts for NO EXTRA PAY. This work is not important enough to justify the physical toll that overnight shifts take on workers, and it’s ridiculous that leadership even considered it as an option. The financial priorities of the company are also ridiculous, and the owners make lots of bad decisions without learning from any of them. As mentioned above, there are no pay increases for techs. Better pay would help with the very high turnover, cut down on resources spent on training, and enable the company to retain the institutional knowledge that techs develop over time. The owners seem to prefer to have a workforce of under-trained newcomers. The equipment we use is constantly breaking, as none of it was designed for the volume of work that we do, and often we use machines designed for one type of media to scan something completely different. Our requests for repairs or new tools are responded to slowly and reluctantly, or just flat-out ignored because management doesn’t want to spend the money to fix things. Most of our setups are jerry-rigged with whatever spare materials we can find, and even then, they only work just well enough to get a mediocre result. A lot of time is wasted on troubleshooting and temporary fixes. Upper management recently fired several extremely valuable employees across multiple departments (one of whom had been with the company for TWELVE YEARS) with no warning and no plan of how to keep the company running without them. The effects were immediate, and the next day project managers were taken away from their work to do the jobs of the people who had been fired. We were told it was a “restructuring” that was necessary for budgetary reasons – but there was still enough money to open a brand new lab in Florida. Now the Newton lab has almost no one left to do managerial tasks on the floor, answer questions, or train new techs. This isn’t even the first time that upper management has done this. A little over a year ago, there was another surprise mass firing of mid-level employees in the photo department that also included an employee with a decade of service. Upper management claimed that this was for performance reasons, but refilled fewer than half of the positions and paid the newly promoted employees less money than those they had just fired… so make of that what you will. After this most recent round of “restructuring”, the photo floor management staff that was once 7 people is now down to one full-time and one part-time employee. And just to illustrate how cruel these “restructurings” are: One of the managers who was fired had asked to go home early that day to take care of his sick child. Upper management denied this request, and made him work the rest of the day, just to be fired that afternoon. A final note: When management realized that there are a lot of negative reviews on sites like this, they decided that rather than listening to the feedback and learning from it, they would ask the techs to write reviews that were “more balanced” (read: favorable to the company). They sent out the email to small groups of people at different times, to avoid it being obvious to the review sites that they were trying to manipulate their reviews. But it was very obvious that manipulating the reviews is exactly what they wanted to do; they even gave some instructions on how they thought reviews should be written. Here’s some of their advice: “While you can frame things as good or bad, it’s probably more useful to comment on a good fit or a bad fit. EverPresent has strengths and weaknesses. What matters to people is whether the strengths are things they care about, and the weaknesses are things they can deal with, and/or that the company is working on improving.” So, to review the company in the terms they requested: EverPresent is a good fit for anyone who really needs any job they can get, and a bad fit for anyone who wants to be respected and fairly compensated at work. Its strength is that it is a job that you don’t need any experience for. Its weaknesses are low pay, terrible management, arbitrary rules, needlessly convoluted workflows, constant understaffing, inflexible policies, practically no advancement opportunities, and bare-minimum benefits. None of this will change, as the people who run the company do not care about their employees or their clients. The only thing that the company is working on improving is its profit margin.