regional account manager

project coordinator

account analyst

project manager

offering manager

Granite Telecommunications

Granite has a lot of potential and growth opportunity and a lot of really great ideas that are hampered by the owners.  As a privately-owned corporation they have the ability to move quickly, but the two owners have some very rigid views on how things should be done that perpetuate the small-company methods that got them to where they are, but are inappropriate to a larger company.  They maintain very rigid command and control of every aspect of the organization, from the CEO being involved in every major customer contact, to the CFO being required to sign every proposal document.  The sales department, the baby of the CEO, have far too much responsibility for processes, but have not been organized to keep from stepping on the toes of other people, and hamper the efforts of the support organizations behind them.  

For example, I was brought in to help them build a government proposals department, but there is no defined government sales organization.  One of the sales offices, in Florida, had discovered the market and had some folks who had a very basic understanding of proposals, but not how to interact with government clients or what went into proposals.  No territories were assigned, so none of them understood the requirements of each state. The strategy for government sales, as far as I could determine, was "spaghetti against the wall" proposals, submitting without any capture work done before the RFP/RFI was issued. Although sales goals were given to the sales departments, the nascent proposals team were held responsible for losses without any way to effect outcomes.  When you consider the other support structures (legal, pricing, technical review) were all very siloed, it was impossible to gain consensus on how to change strategy.  The excuse I was given for this was all about politics among the middle and upper management fighting for the favor of the two owners.

The culture in Granite was almost schizophrenic. They held a very "family" attitude towards their workforce, with lots of great programs to pull people together, but the siloed organization made for conflict over every aspect of doing business.  They are VERY big on charity, from offering paid volunteer time to making casual Friday a charitable event, with anyone donating a small sum to different charity each Thursday to dress down on Friday. Seems very progressive, but they also have a ridiculously rigid and old-school view on work-from-home, dress code and attendance that makes it feel like something out of the 60's.  Coherence inside the teams was very cooperative, but between the teams it was almost hostile.

Contracting with Granite was the worst contracting experience I've had.  I was interviewed for a full-time position in August.  I was brought in for a second interview and it looked very positive, with my prospective manager expressing a lot of excitement to get me started.  By the end of August, I was given the impression it was just a matter of days to get me hired.  Then they ghosted me.  I'd written them off, but was surprised to hear form them at the start of December.  Apparently there had been some "upper management issues" that got in the way of making a decision.  Remember what Is aid about command-and-control at the upper-most levels?  It was a case of the director of government services having to go to war with the owners to start building an actual government department instead of just doing it the way they always had, with ONE person being the proposal writer with a couple of admins.  The award of a major federal contract he was finally able to get the okay to bring in...two more people.  I was the second, the other being an attorney with federal experience.  Suddenly, they wanted me to start the day after Christmas.  To make it happen quicker, they brought me in as a contract-to-hire.  I worked the three months, with a lot of positive feedback and success, and implementation of a lot of what I suggested.  As the structure took form, however, the silo conflict got heated as other departments had to change to meet what we were building.  In February they started hiring for a government office in Virginia to service the federal work (I was handling state work), and wanted me and the second writer hired to train them.  I was told I was to be hired full-time and that they wanted me to help train up the people in VA.  The week they came up, I managed to keep up with all of my own work while getting them up to speed.  That Friday...I was told by my agency to not bother coming in on Monday as they'd let me go for "performance issues" without any details.  The only issue with my work that I'd been told about was the amount we were spending on overnight shipping, because the proposals were going out last minute, which was caused by the pricing department not giving us the numbers until the very last day before proposal due date.


All in all, Granite was a good experience, but I would not recommend them to anyone who has been working in a larger corporation that has adopted modern management techniques.  The jarring level of small-company improvisation in a large-corporate environment, coupled with extremely outdated business culture is fairly toxic to professional development and limits chances for advancement to the very few who want to play the politics and invest a large number of years to make the first steps up the ladder.

Great place to learn because you can be hired with little to no networking experience. Networking experience isn’t exactly necessary for a NetOps role but can be very helpful. There is training documentation for just about everything thanks to a great group of people within the department that volunteer on top of their daily responsibilities/ticket work. Some reps get by knowing the bare minimum but the material to become knowledgeable is there. Most troubleshooting is done by the carrier, you just have to be good at keeping the customer updated and really pushing the carriers to resolve the issues. You’ll also be exposed to Cisco CLI in order to troubleshoot managed routers which is the most interesting part of the job IMO.

I say the company is wasted potential due to their empty promises. When I joined they went on and on about huge plans for restructuring the department and a new and improved “path to progress” with new titles and their respective pay increases. Well, the restructuring happened, which was a merger of two different repair teams effectively doubling responsibilities… think the promised pay raise came with it? Nope.. well yes but only for new hires. So new hires are making 10-20k more a year than existing employees while doing the exact same work, a lot of the times less work since they needed to be trained and mentored. The worst part is that due to upper management politics even the previous promotion system is completely gone. Before, each employee was up for promotion every year with a small raise. Since the merger, there have been 0 promotions and they’ve admitted that there will be none for the foreseeable future. It’s always “so and so are looking into it, paperwork has landed on so and so’s desk”Lots of people have silent quit and are quitting or getting fired because there is no longer any incentive to be a good employee. On top of this the amount of tickets is insane, some reps have 40-50 tickets and get assigned 20+ new tickets some days.. all while being required to take calls from customers and techs and being expected to work those. When I joined they also spoke about how the company is transitioning from a sales company to technology… but it is clear that that has not started. New customers come in every day which create more work but the company refuses to invest in the repair team that is responsible for retaining those customers. So SLAs are constantly breached and customers get poor service, unless they are one of the few that have a dedicated team.  

Just to be clear, I dont think the department supervisors are necessarily the issue, it seems to be the upper management - VPs, C suite execs. The people within the department are generally great people who are kind and helpful.

All in all the company has potential but they need to figure out the direction that they want to go in. It seems like although they committed and made the big changes, now they aren’t sure that was the right idea and are trying to figure it out on the fly.

This is a terrible place to work. They lie in the interview and say there is a month of trainig but there isn't any trainig, it's just a week of shadowing. Then management expects you to handle everything without really showing or teaching you how to. Other departments will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat and will blame you for things that aren't your fault. They don't even teach you how to use the software that you need to use for your job. They lied and said they were flexible with times you need to come in and then will schedule you whenever and if you complain they basically tell you to get over it. The customer service department is severely under staffed and yet the owner likes to tell businesses that they have a special customer service department that is just for them when in reality, it's the regular customer service department. They also don't care about their employees much at all. People are afraid to call out of work for fear of losing their job. Once you run out of PTO you will be fired. One girl cracked her head open and came back the day she was released from the hospital and another girl got into a car crash on her lunch break and came right back to work because they would have been fired if they missed work. If you are a customer service rep, premier rep or work on one of the repair teams, you do not get holidays off. Meanwhile, the company holds contests for the rest of the departments to get an extra day off like black Friday for example. Everyone else has to come for their regular shift. The people who run the company don't even know whats going on in their departments and weren't even aware of some of the features of the software that the company used. Most departments don't like to answer the phone so when a customer was angry and needed to talk with a specific department, sometimes it would take over 30 minutes to get someone to take the call. No one wanted to reach out to customers to clarify and issue and would ask me via email instead which would take days to over a week of going back and forth to get the answers when everything could have been resolved had they just called the customer themselves. Many of the supervisors just mess around and would be on their phones the whole time or talking to each other and would usually wave you off if you needed them to take a look at an issue that a customer was having. Overall, it is not worth working here and many of the employees have been there for only a year or less because many people don't last long here. Avoid this place at all costs.

My time at granite started out alright I was working with good people and this job seemed like they wanted to cultivate a culture of innovation and growth... welp, I was terribly wrong about that.  This companies leadership is still stuck in the stone age and it seems to not want to do anything but progress. The CEO claims this is a "technology company" but what tech is being created? Absolutely none, you just re-sell data circuits from another carrier and then charge an overhead fee for us maintaining the circuit and contacting the carrier so the customer doesn't have to deal with the headache of waiting on hold.  There is absolutely no workflow management, it's a constant wildfire of escalations, people calling in asking why their site is hard down when they created the ticket 2 days ago.  You're expected to take calls, respond to escalations, and somehow manage old tickets all at the same time.  They restricted work-from-home privileges even though productivity was up which made 0 sense but that's what boomer leadership does to a company.  All departments are silo'd from each other, you're expected to do their jobs for them even though you practically have no idea of the job description which just pushes projects back and makes your workload even more confusing than it already is.  The training you get is basically them throwing you in a teams call and they throw up a screen share and they say " just watch " so by the time you hit the floor you have realistically no idea what is happening and it's sink or swim.  Leadership has no idea what is happening in the front line and makes no efforts to understand what is really happening, it's all just a game of cat and mouse where if the big boss walks in the room everybody just completely shxx themselves and they have to actually wake up and do something.  There is no skill improvement or even skills to attain in this job, as long as you know how to respond to emails really fast and wait on hold for hours while you lose your mind this job is right up your ally.  If you have self-respect for your technology career as a networking professional, look elsewhere as this company entirely is just a reselling scheme that is still stuck in the dot com era.  That is all I have to say , please look elsewhere for employment.

This has to be one of the worst job you could have if you appreciate being dignified by customers and other people in your workplace. The work dynamic in this job is so bad i can't even begin to start. Customer services reps are seen as the bottom of the barrel. No one in any department respects you or your work at the very least. Repair, premier, or even provisions are so rude to you and make you feel so little. There is no sense of team when working in customer service. Ask them about the turnover rate, the amount of new people that have come and gone has to be astronomical. You could not pay me enough to work this job again. 

The way they keep people relatively happy and keep going is they have weekly meeting to acknowledge the people who took the most calls. This makes the try-hards works harder and the people at the bottom aspire to here there name. It's literally like herding sheep, it's really sad. On top of that the pay is laughable. So to sum it up I wouldn't suggest working here at all. Your mental health will take a toll on you after being verbally abused by privilege condescending customers while having 0 respect from other departments. 

The best thing i could say is the supervisors are very nice and helpful (When they want to be) but they do have there clear favorites. I'm writing this not because I hate everything about Granite. I'm writing this because i wish i knew what i was getting into before i started here (and i hate Granite). If you have a college degree and aspire to do something within your field, then do that. This job should be nothing more than a pit stop to your actual career. Do not get sucked in to this machine because they will work you until you quit and find another desperate recent grad looking for a "corporate" job to "grow within the company". 

My overall experience at Granite started off well in the beginning but ended up being subpar overall. Ended up being way too bogged down in tickets. They (upper management) never considered how long it can take for certain tickets to get worked (depending on the issue, carrier, etc.) which is sad considering all of upper management were previously reps and were in our shoes at some point. 

The periods where things were slow (which was almost never for the last two years I was there), you have to really exaggerate work to try to hit their metrics. For example, people would double or even triple work tickets that only needed the work of one person for the day. I never understood why they didn't just adjust the metrics based off the season we are in.

Most of the other reps there were cool. Upper management was terrible minus one or two people. 

Best part about my time there was going to the gym. If the gym isn't crowded (as it's not a big box gym like a Planet Fitness for example) then it has great use.

PTO usage is terrible. If you call out, you have to use some form of PTO instead of having the option to take an unpaid day.

I could go on and on but the main thing is, if you're not hitting their metrics, you're useless to them, despite if you're actually a good rep or not. If you want to work here, be prepared to be overworked and feeling lifeless at the end of the day. At least the gym will be there to help if you enjoy working out.



Granite is great for someone fresh out of college looking to get into the business world and get a feel for office culture. It provides employees with opportunities to learn and advance although advancement here is based more off of how long you have been an employee as opposed to your exact skill set. The primary focus of the company is sales. The CEO has a sales background and is an all around great guy but new sales and opportunities tend to take higher preference than retention of clients. Departments outside of sales don't get as much attention as they deserve in my opinion because they are not "generating new cash flow". The company is growing and has been growing every year since it was formed. A few major sales pitches that the company uses to pull in new talent are that the company has zero debt and that they have never had to lay off an employee. The zero debt is impressive although may be changing soon to pursue some infrastructure costs that will boost sales/profits in the future. The never having to lay off an employee is not as impressive because there is a fairly high turnover rate and for the most part once you're an employee you are an employee for good outside of making an extremely significant mistake.

Granite doesn't hire for roles they are contractually obligated to with major customers. C-level is insanely toxic: they literally scream and call people out for minor transgressions in group meetings. If you don't answer a call outside of business hours expect to be chewed out--even if you call back in 30 minutes or have provided updates via email. They act like no one has a life outside of work and no one needs to eat or use the bathroom--it's seriously insane and I recommend people avoid dealing with upper management at all costs. Upper management takes credit for their direct reports' work and blames them if things go wrong. Lots of gaslighting and lying about paperwork for promotions, changes, processes, and every process is thrown out if a customer is angry or calls one of their buddies at the top.  

Granite is a good place to get experience and then get out after a year or so. 

Everything is a total mess and protocols are constantly changing and being updated. It is difficult to keep up with new changes to the way you complete your projects every. single. day. and still meet your deadlines. It is also comical that they do NOT provide any remotely helpful training, and then expect you to be knowledgable about Granite products and maintain 98% accuracy in everything you do. You have to seek your own training and annoy your coworkers to show you how to do every single little thing - while they honestly do not have time for you. I've now been on both sides. 

Granite does not care about individual employees. Pay is WELL below market. Not enough parking. No flexibility. Everyone is expected to clock in at 8, clock out for lunch at 12, clock back in at 1, and out again at 5. Everyone - at the same exact time. Childish. You have to come in when it snows because they are too cheap to give employees laptops or allow them to work from home. They claim to be working on this however it is January and I have not heard a thing. 

This being said, you have to use this job to elevate you to better things. Use your time here to master skills for when you move on. I know when I move on I'll be thankful for this place for breaking me into the working world and showing me the bottom of the barrel.

The work itself is a good learning experience if you want to understand networking a bit more. 

The company provides basic network troubleshooting training but as you learn more skills, you are expected to do more without any form of compensation.

Granite Telecommunications steers more into the "marketing" industry and less about fixing the customers network issues.

They continue to remove employees privileges making the office an extremely uncomfortable work environment unless you are in upper management.

The Network Operations Center [The backbone of the company] is absolutely underpaid and taken advantage of. They will push trainings on employees that only pertains to the benefits of the company and their products.

Network technicians are given a Laptop to perform duties and are expected to be at the office 5 days a week when the work performed is remote. 

When in office, expect to be treated like a child in high school as there are no permanent seats. It's required to bring in the laptop they provide you and to find a seat in the noisy office with limited seating.

The job itself can be fulfulling when actually repairing the networking issues for customers, but definitely not worth the headache.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Regional account manager 13 salaries reported	$52,692 per year
Project coordinator 7 salaries reported	$48,286 per year
Account analyst 12 salaries reported	$49,500 per year
Project manager 3 salaries reported	$89,867 per year
Offering manager 3 salaries reported	$50,973 per year

Working at Granite Telecommunications: Company Overview and Reviews

Granite Telecommunications

Granite Telecommunications Ratings

Popular jobs at Granite Telecommunications

Salary Satisfaction

Job Seeker Tools

Employer Tools

Browse

Stay Connected