Pluspunten
Pay is good. Benefits are good too. Payroll is done on time and no checks bounce. Tools are provided and you can expense out for tools you need.
Minpunten
Travel. You are on the road 50 weeks out of the year. Home on Friday - maybe and out again Monday morning. When you call in needing help, forget it. Most calls are not returned on a timely basis if they are returned at all. You are on your own. Documentation is abysmally bad so self help is limited. Many things are undocumented and known only by a few. Hard to get information as people sit on it and don't share. Customers are abusive at times. Good luck in getting a manager to help you with an abusive customer. You are often on your own and get thrown into situations where you have never seen the equipment before or you are dealing with obsolete equipment band-aided together over the years by the customer. Work is dirty. Count on returning to the hotel filthy. Your health will suffer as you often wind up eating meals on the go (fast food). Combined with late days, and early mornings, you are under the gun to get things done ASAP. The worst words you come to know are "how is it going?" when your supervisor calls. It is a measure designed to get you to hurry it up. Have a family? Forget about them as you will only see them on weekends. Divorce is an ever present risk. Turn over rate is high for new employees. Do not get seriously hurt on the job As a field service tech, you are viewed by the Chicago office employees as an animal and expendable - that is an unspoken attitude but you sense it. Forget about advancement. It just won't happen. People in the Chicago office are promoted into positions before a field service tech is even considered. They are significantly understaffed for field service techs. If you are hired in for a specific job, you may work it, but you will work on whatever jobs are required. Training is spotty. Get trained on TWINCAT and never use the training for four years and are expected to remember the nuances and the software changes significantly between revisions. Again documentation is bad. You may be working on equipment that is 20+ years out of production and has a very limited amount of spare parts on hand (i.e. Siemens 3N control cannot get any push buttons for front panels). Issues that are ethical. It is up to you on how to handle those. You are sometimes thrown at a problem just to keep the customer off management's back. Several guys got into trouble posting their resumes to Monster.com. Suspect this review won't be well received.