DO. NOT. WORK. HERE. - Managed Service Consultant Softlanding Solutions Employee Review

Like another reviewer, this looks like a modern, easy going workplace from afar, but once you're hired, you realize that there is a pretty nasty underbelly to this place. 1. There are certain sections of upper management,who believe we should sacrifice our entire lives to the company. You want a work/life balance? Sorry, our clients are more important than your wellbeing. Employees who stick up for themselves get terminated pretty quick, it hasn't been helped by some colleagues also being chronic workaholics, and if you don't fall into the same line, management will get on your case for this. 2. Management does not have your back. It doesn't matter if the client made a mistake, you are responsible for it. Depending on the client, that can have pretty serious repercussions. 3. Complete culture of fear within the managed services team which has been perpetuated by my immediate manager (not director). He doesn't support the needs of the team, he'll only speak to you if you've done something wrong, and he'll be the first to feed you to the wolves of middle/senior management. On numerous occasions he has been found to be bragging about the power he has, and threatening to dismiss employees in front of the entire team. Numerous reports to senior management have been ignored about his behavior. 4. Timesheets. Timesheets. Timesheets. If you thought general micromanagement is bad, try having to justify every 15 minutes you spend doing X, Y and Z, then getting into an argument with management over how that time has been allocated, documented etc etc after which you end up logging 45 minutes to a non-billable timecode and then getting in trouble for spending the 45 minutes arguing with management over it. Essentially the key part of the role is entering in how much you spent doing a task and how long it took you. All well and good, until you have to have a solid 8 hours accounted for, and if you don't then you get threatened with a dock in pay, vacation or banked overtime; which is probably breach of contract because employees are salary. 5. OT benefits are pretty meager. The Company makes no hesitation about reminding you about the High-Tech Workers OT exception in British Columbia, and telling you that you should be grateful for what they provide. Essentially any OT work is 1:1 Banked time off in lieu. On-Call is $300 a week. Good deal you think? Not so. That isn't a standby rate, that is the standby rate PLUS 4 hours of tasks rising out of on-call. Those 4 hours? Yeah, there isn't a minimum callout time. You could be woken up 4 times in a night and it only be logged as 1 hour. To hit the banked OT rate after 4 hours, you have to have a really terrible week. 6. There is work from home flexibility; but management prohibits you from using the education timecode when you are working from home. So the timesheet becomes even more of a nightmare to fill up with tasks if you can pad out the slow time with learning. Essentially, this bore out of a frustration from management that people's learning wasn't translating into certs. The reality is that you may fit 4 -15 minute blocks of learning into a day, but you never ever get time to focus on learning for a cert. So the blame is at their door. 7. Prepare yourself for arguments over everything. How a client should be billed? Which SOP is correct? Did the request come in through the proper channels? --- There's so many SOPs which are treated as the law of the land, but they themselves are either terribly flawed, have no means to be actively enforced, outdated, or/and often non-existent. 8. It's a good thing that the company help pay for your MSP, because you *will* be seeing the doctor for work related stress. I guarantee it. 9. They'll give you a fancy title of 'Consultant' in the Managed Services Team, but it really is a help desk role. And if you want to get an idea of how much they bend over for clients, they allowed end-users to raise Priority 1 tickets for password resets because the client demanded it; negatively impacting everything else. Softlanding brags about how it's one of the best Canadian MSPs. The reality is that it's your general run-of-the-mill poorly managed small MSP with all the little terrors that come with it.