facilities engineer

data center technician

senior financial analyst

data center engineer

account executive

Equinix

My experience and staffing overview.

I have 11 years military experience up to Staff Non-commissioned officer, 4 years private security, with 2 of those years as a supervisor.
This is where the rubber meets the road when balancing the needs of the contract with your front line service providers/employees. I would like this to stand as a open letter to Equinix Staff and Executive management about what is going on under their watch. 

G4S currently holds the contact to provide physical security service to Equinix. This was a transition from Securitas roughly a year ago. One of the contract staffing stipulations required by Equinix is that new hires have 2 years data center security experience, this is a massive demand disparity because security officers with that kind of experience are either looking at being promoted or have established and cemented themselves at their current job and are not looking to move. Equinix's requirement is the largest problem in G4S being able to proactively staff IBX facilities resulting in officers having to work 16 hour shifts or only get 8-hour turnaround times. This has resulted in off the clock injuries and accidents. This issue causes Non-billable overtime creating G4S internal issues because managers bonuses become threatend with NBOT overages  

this is further exasperated by other data centers in the area Google, Facebook, who all are staffed by G4S offer PTO accrual and provide meals/snacks at no cost to the contractors, while providing similar pay, ($16 - $19 per hour for security officers) ($20 - $26 for shift supervisors / training supervisors) (Managers and Site Sup make salary) 

Contract, SOP and hardware updates needed.

This company has fallen behind the times and needs to play catch up. 5 levels of security is a great selling point but other firms have fewer security measures and SOPs while were written in 2002 and have not been updated their systems are 10-12 years behind the times. The goal of being a REIT has done a lot to put money in the shareholders hands but little in the way of reinvesting into the structure and culture of the business, this is reflected in policy and Climate that comes from Executive and Management and Director level staff. (Second hand knowledge from water cooler discussions with IBX managers and contracted service managers working within/for Equinx.)

High turnover and poor retention are symptoms of problems with management and company policy 

Things that can be changed with no fiscal impact to the company.

Connect and Consult with boots on the ground workers to revamp the SOPs for your physical security, provide training and development for all contracted workers to expand within the company should the contract provide it especially if it is not offered by the contracted company.

I do not want this to sound like just a complaint. So, the actual service that Equinix wants to provide is great and they do care about their branding the detail and customer service is a hallmark of the company.

IMHO Equinix would do well to identify key players in their contracted security provider and look at bringing them over and making physical security an in-house section. This can do well to enhance the branding as well as have security be an all-in provider that is equally viewed as part of the Equinix team.

The only thing at this point that keeps me coming to work is the pay check. I am currently looking to move to a different type of work.

The people are great and go out of their way to help you, but for the past three years, saving money to make stockholders and the CEO more money has become the #1 priority, and it feels like it's the one and only priority.
Most "perks" have been taken away. On average, pay raises are between 1% and 3% per year, and employee benefits prices have risen much more than that and gotten worse. In a nutshell, your income will only go down if you are not able to climb the corporate ladder.
The money-saving is now at the stage where the corporate direction is to drive the current talent to leave just so they can acquire cheap labor, not talent.
The company initially declined to jump on the cloud bandwagon—honestly, it does not fit their core business model—and now they have a lot to catch up to. Instead of investing for the long term and adapting, they only look for short-term profits, nothing more.
"Office politics" amongst management is huge, and if you are not in the ingroup, forget about career progression; I feel like I just happened to luck out a bit. Some parts of the country encounter a bit less of it but I can say that it's part of the underlying culture.
HR is only there to protect the company, not to assist the employees—which is true for most companies—but at Equinix, they sure make you understand that they are only there to help profits. If you have had an experience with any IT department within most companies and felt like they were only there to make you jump through hoops to get you nowhere, well, it feels like everyone in HR was trained by IT.

I’m always thankful of the skills I developed during my time at Equinix, but it truly was the worst place I’ve ever worked for since I began my HR journey. No formal training, managers just throw you a bunch of projects and poorly written SOPs to build policies and educate employees. Since it’s a global company, every HR associate had a group of countries to assist. The problem with that is, leadership would want you to take on the work of seven people successfully, but would not pay fairly or even promote you. Myself and other HR Service associates would be on the verge of tears watching incompetent people get roles that we’ve been training and working so hard for. And don’t get me started on the brown nosers! Your teammates are NOT your friends. Do not confide in anyone at Equinix. They’re baiting you in to fail. I won’t lie to you, I knew I wasn’t going to last maybe two-three months into my role at Equinix. My advice is to use Equinix for all the tools and career development you can get from all of the work they throw at you. Then, find a better role that can grow into an actual lucrative career. 

Equinix's strength lies in the organization that runs their data and colocation centers ("Operations").  That organization is great.  The rest of the organizations are so-so.

Equinix is an REIT and grows by acquiring smaller data centers in targeted regions.  This has led to a company that has grown very fast but still has the "fly-by-night" of a company one-fourth its size.  The organizations other than Operations still function like it is a sub-1000 person company.  Procedures are spotty.  Platforms are ancient.  Lots of stuff falls through the cracks.

The best example I can give is that if you create an internal help ticket, it pretty much goes into the void unless you know the exact one person who can help.  There is only one person in the company doing that with no redundancy or process surrounding it.  At one point, I was correcting code in Production(!)

The compensation is not competitive and managers get around this by vastly inflating titles.  You will run into "Senior Manager<comma>" or even "Director<comma>" and it's an individual contributor with only medium experience.  Finally, you only get 15 days of combined illness/vacation which is not a lot.

Interesting business and market leader. Nice, interesting colleagues generally. However, over the last 2 years a game of political chess has been playing out with the new CEO gutting almost the entire leadership team and layers below. This completely changed the culture and vibe. Its pretty demotivating for anyone who has worked at the company for more than a couple of years, and has killed the collegial spirit that was there, replacing it with a culture of fear. If you believe the changes were necessary and right its probably fine, but many replacements are hired through execs networks, which I guess is how things go, but it doesn't appear very meritocratic. In general the rationale for the people changes could have been better explained internally. There is also always speak of change (besides org structures) but not that much changes except firing people or shuffling things around. I'm sure they will continue to ride the wave, others are moving faster and more purposefully in this space, time will tell if the people changes lead to them doing anything more than continuing to ride the wave. 

Manage projects involving customer equipment, capital improvements, and computerized preventive
maintenance repair and maintenance system.
♦ Respond on an as-needed basis to emergencies such as system failures, fire alarms, severe weather,
etc., 24/7 and arrange for back up when not available.
♦ Manage personnel administration duties, including salary, reviews, and disciplinary actions. Implement
and enforce corporate safety, health and environmental policies, including activities of outside
contractors to ensure no adverse effect on the operation of the facility.
♦ Effectively manage facility maintenance for all mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, direct
and train operations team in a manner that achieves availability objectives of 99.999% or better.
Achievement of this level of availability and effective management of personnel activities was
achieved through training, and comprehensive knowledge of central plant systems and the specific
redundancy features of the systems.

I got trained and hired to work for Equinix as a Global Service Desk. The training was good and mostly complete, the main issue is that our management left really early and left us with more questions that answers. This led to the eventual decline of my team as the managing team could not  teach us in the pase that we should have supposed to learn the scheduling program. From an administrative point as I reviewed multiple branches, this did not happen in most of the locations. But unfortunately for me I got the management stance of :I'm busy look  within the manual and figure out. For a company that gets a lot of money from a lot of companie; the fact that they can't get decent management hours to fully train their customer service attendees in case of emergencies that can cost 10 times the money invested on employees makes you wonder where are Equinix priorities. I learned a lot of the system within Equinix, by myself as I did not had a boss or manager to even ask them questions about.

I came into Equinix through an associate I worked with at Inktomi Corp. I was a stand alone Accounts Payable processer and handled all invoices, approvals, expense reports and payments. They were in Oracle 11 and everything was manual. We sent Fed Ex packages of invoices back and forth across the country for signature approvals. Then they upgraded to Oracle R12 which added in invoice scanning with workflow approval, and these new modules were added;  I-Expense, I-Procurement and Payment Manager. This allowed the company to go almost completely paperless and streamlined approval processes. The only reason I had to resign my position with Equinix was to care for my mother-in-law while she went through cancer treatment, otherwise I'd still be working there.

Working with Equinix would be extremely difficult to top. The culture is fantastic. The work both challenging and rewarding. The people are extraordinary and highly collaborative. It would be difficult to top the overall compensation package.

The last year became more difficult. New leadership eliminated all the talented people around me, removed some of my responsibilities, and began to make significant changes to my historically successful program. Some of the changes were an improvement, others felt like change for change sake. 

Advancement was difficult to come by in my role, but I observed a number of people I respected move up. 

I would highly recommend Equinix despite a difficult final year.

As a Facility Engineer in HVAC division, we had the task of maintaining & repairing all HVAC systems including 200 ton rooftop systems as well as cooling towers. Company promotes New employees with less than a year experience to a supervisory role who has very limited HVAC experience , enough to make the job dangerous to workers. They should promote the employees who have the credentials & experience to handle the HVAC units
The Micro managers insist on ordering substandard materials, from the internet, that do not fit the HVAC systems causing the units to break down more and operate poorly. They do this to justify their salary and the attempt to save money while it only causes units to break down and place employees and company in danger, making themselves liable for legal actions.
They violate federal labor laws as well as EPA laws and give substandard pay to tradesmen who work on HVAC & IT equipment

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
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Account executive 1 salary reported	$8,350 per month

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