A 100+ year company, AT&T is the first iteration to ever layoff outside technicians
Pros
-The job itself is fun and challenging, no other cable and/or internet company requires its technicians to know as much as AT&T technicians have to -The pay is good as long as you don't allow them to lowball you with your starting rate, which they will absolutely try to do do everyone -You're on your own in the field, so you don't have to deal with coworkers -Work at your own pace, within reason -Always something new everyday, always something new to learn -Get to interact with a new customer everyday
Cons
-This position is currently (2018) being laid off gradually in every state. -Where do I start? AT&T is a machine, one of the biggest machines in American history. There is a lot going on under the surface that most don't even pick up on. -This position was given a $3 incremental raise ratified in 2017 to cover a five year period of 2017-2021, which means this positions compensation is increasing at a rate of less than a dollar per year, or in other words not keeping up with inflation and is actually receiving a pay decrease. -Talking to management in AT&T is identical to talking to the police. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Casual conversations will be permanently documented in your file. There is a union vs non-union, us vs them mentality. The management actively seek to break technician morale in any shop and turn technicians against each other and use them as spys to gather information against their co-workers. This is a dice roll on whether or not your co-workers will be knowledgeable enough about their own rights and either stick together or fold and turn against each other in order to volunteer to do managements job for them. -This is a position that AT&T created in order to cut cost, where historically this exact same work would fall under a higher paid department. AT&T does this with a lot of different positions, get rid of the old position and create a new underpaid position to do the exact same work. -You have to teach yourself the job for the most part, and your level of expertise needed will vary greatly depending on where you work. The training is good but it can never prepare you to work in the inner city, but it will work for the higher scale and newly built cities and suburbs. -Working in the inner city, lower income neighborhoods, the job is completely different than higher income areas. The AT&T facilities are in disrepair. The technicians have a lot more work to do. Management doesnt account for any of this variation. The company pretends like you are working in a factory doing repetitive identical work and that everything is uniform. AT&T has a textbook example for every single part of our job and any variation outside of that example is not taken into account in metrics and is not recognized. Maybe you will be lucky and work in an area that fits AT&Ts dreamwork scenarios and metrics, or maybe you will work in an inner city ghetto where stuff is falling apart and you have to have much more technical knowledge and expertise on how to make this work and do things outside of your job description and receive no recognition and have management act like what you're talking about does not exist. -When AT&T started Uverse and expanded Uverse, they hired technicians to prepare their facilities for the new system, but many of their employees frauded this upgrade process As a result, AT&T has ghost or phantom facilities, where the company records don't match reality, and we have to make something work on cable from the 1970s and 1960s but the company records are saying it was upgraded, and there is no way to correct this and the company doesn't recognize or view this as an issue. -Your first level manager is a peon who cannot influence any processes or policies within the company, his job is to get you to produce metrics and anything else is swept under the rug. -This position is underpaid relative to work expectations and knowledge required to perform this job successfully. -There is no incentive to do the job correctly. Technicians who do slap things together with no craftsmanship can thrive here because as long as you're meeting your metrics, the management will not say anything to you. But if you take your time to do the job the correct way, you won't be appreciated for that and you can become a target for disciplinary action because your working slower than technicians who are cutting corners and breaking rules. -AT&T also stands for At This Time, because what management says changes according to the flavor or the issue of the month, and things are never followed up on. -AT&T also stands for Always The Tech, the company is always looking for a new way to make something another department did your responsibility -The job responsibilities of this position have steadily increased since this position was introduced in 07-08, with no metric or monetary compensation for the extra work or requirements. Every year you have to do something new but the company never properly adjust the metrics to account for the additional work requirements. -You can be disciplined for someone hitting your parked vehicle, in any motor vehicle accident the company will expend every possible resource to figure out how they can blame you for it. If your vehicle is parked and someone hits your parked vehicle the first question they will ask you is "do you think you could've chosen a better parking location".
