New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
Here's what I'm going to say to the original poster.
I'm sure there is this allure of working for a tech company. You compare the benefits & culture Google promotes to what HostGator/EIG should have. The difference is Google is engineering and programming heavy. There's a limited amount of people who are able to fulfill those positions. This isn't to downplay the position of customer service; you're in one of the most important positions of a company, and you personally can influence a great number of things. However customer service employees are easily replaced and are not revenue generating and that's the most important thing to a company.
Look at the benefits you do have. A 401k program is tremendous, especially if you're younger. I swear -- any of you who have a 401k program, please please please take advantage of it. Take the FULL match; don't do 1%, if your company offers 4%. It's free investment money to you. Every penny your employer matches is going to be another penny invested into the stock market that averages 9% return per year. THIS IS THE EASIEST WAY TO BECOME A MILLIONAIRE!
Free beer? Hell yeah. It's great perk, but it's too bad some employees take advantage of it. I'm sure if it were a serious problem it'd be dealt with, but I'm going to warn you - I wouldn't complain too much. Offering free beer has zero benefits to the company. You're more likely to lose it than have them put a new system in place.
Movie night? That's awesome and it sounds like for the most part they do their best to make up for those who can't make it.
Embrace what you have. Do NOT get caught up in the office culture of questioning managements tactics. It will not get you anywhere. Embrace the change, offer constructive feedback to your manager.
i.e. Can you offer more billing/abuse training classes so I can get those customers off the phone faster?
Aye. This is unskilled customer service, specifically. There is a growing culture for high end, career based customer service. I love being a part of it, we hosted SupConf recently at the office. But a call/chat center that hires unskilled labor is a rough thing right now. That they even keep it in the US is a clear attempt at a commitment to their employees, while everyone else immediately outsources it entirely to the cheapest labor they can find in the world.
It's a tough job, it's a shitty job, but it builds you up. Those of us who pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and worked shitty jobs along the way felt a sense of pride when we got somewhere we could be proud of. I always thought that was bullshit when people told me that, but I did it and I'm proud of it, and I get it now. I wouldn't trade it, I wouldn't undo any of it.
I bagged groceries, I ran a gas station, I changed oil. I'm damn proud to be where I am today. I worked to get here. When my boss interviewed me he asked how he could trust that I would work hard without the accountability of being in the office, I said because I'd like to get more than one paycheck. No one owes me anything. Not everyone in my generation feels that way, and I feel like they're missing out on something great.
I always knew that you are just an alias of Chris Fabozzi behind that friendly mask... ;-)
For me this was a good read, I have not been able to secure a job due to my current living conditions but I love reading about jobs and what they offer and what to expect.
To be honest host gator does not sound so bad, but this was the first time I read about a call center operation, but I really thank you for posting this article.
Ah...when you told me use used to t-bag fruits, I took it a different way...
I worked for Hostgator as an L1 for a period of time and met my metrics and got regular bonuses. From your transcript I think we were there at the same time. Although, I was able to assist with some billing and dedicated/windows issues among other things you said L1 were not allowed to assist with. This was due to the fact I already knew a lot coming in and I pushed my SUP to give me access so I could do my job better. The trainers and my assigned supervisor told me I would move up fast. 7 months there and no sign of moving anywhere with people knowing less than me just 'being in the right place at the right time' getting promotions. Promotions were supposed to be formal and in house but random agents would get promoted off the floor based on how much they kissed the sups' ass and if they needed an L2 or w/e right at that moment. I saw people get hired in higher than me even though they told me coming in that 'everyone starts at l1', load of bullshit. Everything else you said @Mridul was absolutely true and @AnthonySmith I'm disgusted by your ill informed comments. @Mridul just touched the tip of the iceberg with the crap that goes on at this company. He didn't even mention them closing down the HG Austin side of things and forcing people to move to the ASO brand for less pay or be terminated. Just FYI - L3's only make about $2/hr more than L1, not really enough to live in Houston unless you are a single person not supporting anyone. There is a reason our beloved @Jarland doesn't work there anymore and we've had some private chats about that place as well before this thread. I'm in a much better place now, but I'm glad I had the experience there.
Oh dear me, anyone would think I worked my way up in a similar (albeit it significantly larger) place and ended up running it, how ill informed of me.
The OP was just re-posting I believe.
Sorry my opinions do not align with yours, there are just to many people expecting life on a plate these days and it has made me cynical.
Going in to work every day and wondering if you're going to be the next one escorted out for some BS reason that you really knew was about budget cuts...
The entire business was built on a product that was decreasing in price and increasing in cost to maintain and, quite frankly, the requirement of providing everyone with health care that increased in cost each year was the reason Brent sold it. He saw that coming, and he also saw that server resource requirements were increasing while SoftLayer wasn't going to rent them new servers without increasing cost (some of these servers had like 2GB of RAM, products of before the Wordpress revolution, and SL wanted to charge more for new servers than they would new customers, because they were "upgrades"). The company didn't have the bank to maintain SL rentals while building their own new infrastructure at that point.
HG wasn't built to withstand changes in the market or in employment requirements, and needed the resources of a larger financial backer that could shift money around to prop it up while they worked on stripping it down and maximizing profit. Hence the EIG buyout. That's the only thing that saved HG.
It all had to happen. No one did anything wrong. The market changed. The company had to adapt or die.
Gotcha, and I can respect that. I thought mridul was the originator of the content :P So I went ahead and cross posted my content to WHT
>
I hear you there!
Too fucking right. Millenial cunts.
Sounds like the job was not a right fit for the poor lad. For most of us, work sucks. It is hard, and often grueling. Even if we have our "dream job", which I do (as full stack dev at a major company)... work requires a daily grind.
It actually sounded like a nice gig: free training (that I assume they paid you to attend). Not a big deal that they required you to score well on their training material. In most big companies they lay off the lowest performing 10% of all employees every year. It is a constant rush to stay ahead.
I personally would not have liked the micro-managing of my bathroom breaks. But hey, you got to start somewhere, and pick your battles. I once worked for a company that required me to to take care of any "bathroom" stuff before work. He was the boss, not me. His rules. But I realized (for a host of reasons), it would not be a good fit and moved on. If you have good credentials/degrees/etc then you have lots of say and power as an employee. But, most of the time we are all replaceable, and life really sucks when you can't afford your next meal or next months rent.
The only way anyone could pull that off for a full shift is to wear diapers.
Did your boss shill for Huggies?
Ha ha ha... I am not sure how they worked it out. But I was basically told, take your "crap" before you come to work. lol... I did not stick around long enough to find out what happens if someone needed to duce while on the job.
That's employer's speak for: "We have so much crap going on here. I'm full of crap too. This job is just so crappy and we really don't have place for your homebrew stuff too".
I agree. I worked at ice-cream shop, then manual labor at a landscaping company, long enough to land my first tech job... its good for the soul.
Haha I've been told I was a Jr. SYS Admin but I now work with the regular SYS Admins who are classed as Level 3 support. So I guess its different wherever you are. I've personally never done Level 1 (support/service desk) and appreciate they get some pretty awful calls. I don't envy them by any means and started as level 3.
I'm quite glad I don't get monitored on those metrics, I do get monitored on time taken to complete a call but not officially on desk time/rating. Also glad that we have an open policy whereas we are all willing to help and forward calls to the most relevant department without any fuss!
Could be worse though; I guess.
Truthfully I know some great admins that started out as jr admins at HG. There was definitely some talent in the ranks there. But overall it was considered on par with running McDonald's drive thru.
At one point they even filled a bunch of new seats with people from a temp agency and their sole job was to create tickets. Suddenly thousands of tickets and about a week wait time. Consider that basically all services were managed too. VPS, dedi, and hell we'd even alter your Wordpress plugin's code to work if we had to.
Which reminds me, as a Linux Admin there we really did do solid work. Managed service for budget shared hosting customers, fairly inexpensive VPS for managed, considering there was basically no end to what we'd do for you. That, too, was a bit unsustainable.
If you can last in that sort of environment, it sets you up for life, it prepares you for anything a work environment can throw at you.
It is unjust and unfair and incredibly pressured? sure and some people do not want to take that or simply cannot take it.
Having been through it and ended up on top is one of the reasons I can sit here for 30 hours straight when something goes wrong and just work until it is done.
Typically I can get some information from places like these
https://www.glassdoor.ca/Reviews/OVH-Reviews-E523060.htm?utm_source=watcher&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=watch-n&utm_content=wat-n-review
It doesn't hurt to have pride in your work, either.
This is not new thing . Most companies treat the beginner as shit . We have seen many companies in India who does almost like that if not worse .
i was once hostgator customer but i moved to another hosting provider because of pricing as i got low pricing hosting provider then hostgator.
Me too, I was one of their customer about 5 years ago, but I moved to another provider due to many problem about them.
Looking forward to your offer post.
OP did not comment after posting original rant.
Thanks for that, I've been scrolling through the topic for the last 20 minutes trying to find out if he'd replied or not. I could have been trapped for days!
In fact, he never posted to WHT again. (Joined Mar 2017 and has 1 post.)
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1637132
Just saying not worth analyzing his rant if he has no interest participating