journeyperson lineperson

equipment mechanic

utility worker

mechanic

program manager

Pacific Gas and Electric

I have been with the company for years. I plan on retiring here. The pay is amazing. The benefits are good, but they used to be better. And after some time under your belt, you can work a shift of your choice and achieve good work/life balance but it takes time, and lots of hard work to be successful here. But I will say, this is a tough job to have when you're a parent. I wish there were more parent friendly jobs to work while parenting young kids. 

I started in the call center which is the easiest way in, especially if you don't have a degree. The call center is union- IBEW1245. With low seniority, it takes a really long time to move to other areas of the company by bid, unless you are flexible to move to the Bay Area. Many call center reps apply for management positions to get out, and they get great opportunities that way. Management makes less money than union jobs, but management is also eligible for STIP bonus, so if you are good at the job and score high on your end of year eval- you can earn some serious income for bonus which could bump you up quite a bit, maybe $15k or more, from what I've heard. Most management jobs are "sink or swim". You either do really good, and if you don't, you won't last. Some people inch their way through by the seams of their pants, they are the lucky ones who don't have to put in much effort and get away with a lot.  You'll see a diverse work group here. Many people started years ago and helped build the company. A lot of people got in during the times when it was "who you know" to get hired on. Now, it takes work to get on with the company. And many times they want a degree or a TON of experience to back you up unless again, you get hired to work for the call center. 

As much as I desire to stay employed with PG&E, I LOATHE the call center. It's horrible! Way better than most call centers, but still horrible. You really have to be customer service oriented, and open to micro-management, because you are literally chained to your desk, calls monitored, every second of your day is monitored and accounted for, except for breaks and lunch of course, but even then- if you are more than 2 minutes late returning from break or lunch- prepare to have a conversation with your Team Lead. Too many of those and you'll quickly climb the ladder of positive discipline. You'd think being in a union environment that you'd have protection, but that's not the case. The union does try to ensure fairness across the board, which helps when you are addressed about something you've done- but the union has become weak, and they will only help you to an extent. There is a lot of favoritism in the call center and little "cliques"of people, lots of affairs happen here, it's sickening actually, reminds me a lot of high school. 

So, in summary- if you come in to the company via the call center- get out as soon as you become permanent status. Bid out, apply for other jobs, take advantage of the tuition reimbursement so you can get yourself a degree, and find a position that makes you happy here. There are so many opportunities with the company. And while I can only speak to the call center- there is a bigger world beyond there, you just have to be flexible and find your niche. 

If you are looking to work here, don't give up. For some, they apply and wait years before getting in. I made it a goal, I prayed, and I got in. So make it your goal and it will happen for you. Best of luck to you!

When I was hired back in 2005, PG&E's motto was "A Great Place to Work".  We would here the motto used during annual All Hands Meetings, mandatory trainings and uttered by veteran employees.  There were moments when PG&E was a pleasant environment to work--where employees had opportunities for advancement and were recognized for their contributions and dedication to go above and beyond.  The time period was from 2005 and began to decline after the San Bruno explosion in 2010. Since the San Bruno explosion and all the litigation and scrutiny that followed, PG&E's work culture has declined sharply. 

Between 2005 and 2010, the company was progression and truly promoted diversity and inclusion.  There was and always has been a Good Ol Boy culture at PG&E.  Since 2010, the diversity and inclusion efforts at PG&E have come to a severe halt--where instead of the company choosing to be progressive in its operation and company cultural advancements--PG&E has chosen to expand the Good Ol Boy culture and stifle the career advancements of talented people of color--all the while using "diversity and inclusion" rhetoric to maintain a position external perception in society as PG&E being a "A Great Place to Work".

The company has a confirmed and obvious oppressive environment where you are penalized for speaking up about Code of Conduct and racial harassments.  A whistle blower who raises valid concerns of racism, bias and oppression is heard by HR for sake of formality--but the issue raised is often times determined "inconclusive"--whereby those people or persons that have been exposed are then embolden to penalize the whistleblower in various ways of further intimidation, demotion and subtle but obvious forms of further harassments to get the whistle blower to quit.  Only litigation by a Civil Rights attorney would result in any type of positive outcome for Whistle Blowers and others who have been discriminated against through stifled career advancement within the company and racial bias.  There are examples upon examples (personal and many experienced by colleagues) that could be provided here but there's only so much font character space for my review.

If it weren't for my age and life responsibilities, I would've resigned from this one time good company 9-10 years ago. 

Since 2010, PG&E is no longer a great place to work.

Your success at PG&E largely depends on your relationship with your supervisor/manager.

If you have supervisor/manager that models servant-leadership principles and champions for your service delivery, that's great! You'll go far in PG&E. 

You'll experience the following:

- Independence to work as a professional, and make real-time decisions with the full support of your leader
- Support to remove barriers and connect you to appropriate channels to help move your project(s) forward 
- You will go far in receiving positive performance appraisals that can lead to on-the-spot recognition awards, annual raises, and short term incentive program (STIP) bonuses. 
- Being shielded/defended by your manager/supervisor when negative comments are lodged against you by external and internal stakeholders
- Support towards putting your family/personal life ahead of work (work/life balance) 
- Support for contributing ideas/solutions even if they're unpopular/unconventional. At least support to pilot an idea to prove if solution is viable
- Supportive environment where your skills are utilized to the maximum and allows you to grow within the organization.
-  A teamwork-oriented environment in a company that empowers employees to create and take initiatives
- Encouragement to take advantage of PG&E's tuition assistance program to further your skills and/or obtain higher education 
- Support to participate in an employee resource group and develop your leadership skills- give back to the community 

The hardest part of PG&E is when you get a supervisor/manager that doesn't believe in your abilities and micro-manages you to a specific lane. No salary/work benefit is worth it if you're unable to develop your own spark and build yourself up.

PG&E is a HUGE company with many different departments. The workplace culture varies widely between each. If you are new to the company and do not have someone to guide you through for the first few years it is very easy to get lost in the mix. 
Some cons include constant management changes, in my particular department there has been 5 different leadership changes within 3 years, and more are expected. Many times your manager can be working out of a different city and you may only communicate via email, it can be hard to develop any kind of a professional working relationship and creates many different frustrations in regards to developing your skills so that you can move positions. 
It is also important to note that this is a very male dominated company, very few women hold any type of management positions, and there are still some departments where no women work at all. As a women you may need to be prepared to work immensely harder to gain traction in the company. 
The best part of the job is that some positions do not have too much micromanagement, however this can create many feelings of 'sink or swim' situations. 
I have certainly learned to be a very independent worker, and to realize that management can (especially if their work location is in a different city compared to yours),  tend to be out of touch with what challenges you face on a day-to-day basis, and may not truly appreciate your everyday efforts. 
The pay is very good, although sometimes the stresses of the job out weigh that positive. Also, it is sometimes surprising the pay differences between people at the company at all levels. 
Anyway, it is a challenging job, if you are independent, and can take "constructive" criticism with a grain of salt, you just might survive.

11 years of professional experience as a Developer, with 4 years of experience in SalesForce CRM as a Consultant, administrator and developer.
• SalesForce Certified Administrator/Consultant and proficient in agile approaches including test-driven, agile development.
• Rich experience in gathering User Requirements and documenting the same into Functional Requirements/Business Requirement Documentation using various requirements modeling and UML 
tools like Enterprise Architect and MS Visio.
• Excellent knowledge in Business modeling and re-designing the existing systems as per the new 
scenarios. 
• Proficiency in SFDC Administrative tasks like creating Profiles, Roles, Users, Page Layouts, Email Services, Approvals, Workflows, Reports, Dashboards, Tasks and actions.
• Experience in working with Eclipse IDE with Force.com Plug-in environment for writing Business logic inApex Programming Language.

• Experience in SFDC development using Apex classes and Triggers, Visual Force, Force.com IDE, SOQL, 

SOSL.

• Excellent knowledge in service cloud applications like Case management system, Entitlements, 

Knowledgebase management. 

• Participate in planning deployment, release and work with Quality Assurance for system, performance 

test and provide production support and disaster recovery tasks.

• Excellent working knowledge in ANT, Eclipse, Workbench to deploy the code into different 

environments.

• Technical knowledge in Informatica cloud and copystorm. 

• Used Force.com Web services API for implementing web services in the application for access to data 

from different users.

• Excellent knowledge in security and sharing rules at object, field, and record level for different users at 

different levels of organization. Also created various profiles and configured the permissions based on 

the organizational hierarchy.

* A Typical Day at Work: Varies from day to day. That is the greatest aspect of this position. Site visits for orientation with the job site and scope of work, to pre-construction meetings and follow up of progress of the work onsite. 
Reviewing of plans, proposed service, job story, application of tariffs to the request, follow up with customers, determining load demand, etc..there is so much involved with my current position.  
* Lessons Learned: Dealing with a large work load. Being able to provide support to other departments without recognition. Prioritizing of tasks. Working with and relying on multiple departments within the company to reach goals/ deadlines. Dealing with frustration. Pushing/ Driving for results. Record Keeping.Thoroughness.
* Management: It could be better. 
* Co-workers: Excellent. We are all in it together. I strive to be of help to them to show my appreciation. 
* Hardest Aspect: Lack of support at times (when so many departments from construction to the Land Department are running thin. Winning the favor of and /adjusting to expectations of constantly revolving management. High turnover with many departments we depend on.  
*Most Enjoyable Aspects:  Having so many diverse tasks. Challenging. Diverse range of tasks and responsibilities from customer service, to correct interpretation and application of tariffs/ 'greenbook' and engineering standards. Site visits/ working with customers daily. Working with cities, counties, federal government, large developers, solar generation/ renewable energy companies. It never gets boring. Great Job. 
 

Depending on the atmosphere of the office/ work group the work experience may be challenging and rewarding, or frustrating, leading to burn out. Support is key. 

PG&E deals in Gas & Electricity.  With both being volatile, employees are usually serious about what they do.  Rather they take their job seriously, and they should.  The field workers (linemen) are well trained and do their job safely and proficiently.  There is a pride that every PG&E employee has, be it in an office or in the field.  It comes from the days when the company was looked at with softer eyes.  A tmen or crew were heros when they'd re-energize an outage particularly following or in the middle of a big storm.  It's less so now days, but still true to some degree.  On a typical day our (work) group of as many as 10 (usually less) total had 3 daily "A" desks or hot seats as they are sometimes called,  Others worked a swingshift and a graveyard shift.  The job requires 24 hour coverage.  The three (at times with supplemental help) would divide the work somewhat equally while preparing to get barraged with field personnel wanting to know and get direction about their planned or emergent work.  All of us tried to do our best to keep planned work on track while dealing with outages and other work emergencies.  All the while balancing digital maps, reporting, dealing with field employees, rules, computer equipment (SCADA), unforeseen issues and requests from supervisors.  The hardest part of the job is juggling and prioritizing the work while maintaining alertness and staying cut in so that everyone goes home safely.  The most enjoyable part of the job is definitely the people I work with (field) and beside.

PG&E is a an interesting company to be a part of to say the least. As a marketer within the company, you are constantly challenged on how to engage customers with an intangible commodity that they never think about unless it is broken. This hurdle pushes the team to think outside of the box to come up with creative and persuasive ideas to reach customers and cut through the clutter.

PG&E, like any utility, is often seem as slow moving and antiquated in its processes. Although this is true at times, there is a lot of opportunity to influence the way customers are marketed to and engage them in conversations that are often not top of mind. This means that there is opportunity to bring creativity to the table and move the needle on many fronts.

Having been with the company for almost five years, the one thing I can say emphatically about the company is that there is never a dull day at work. PG&E offers a multitude of work experience that has helped me build a strong customer centric portfolio of projects that span from building brand trust to pushing energy efficiency programs. This work includes both the strategic planning from the ground up to hands on involvement of the tactical execution.

•	Competent in SFDC Administrative tasks like creating Profiles, Roles, Users, Email Services, Approvals, Master child Relationship, Lookups, Roll-Up Summary, Workflows, Page Layouts, Tasks and Events.
•	Proficient in Data migration and integration using Data Loader.
•	Expertise in generating custom reports, dashboards, and workflows.
•	Manage operational requests and reporting including customer analysis and individual views, and troubleshoot issues.
•	Extensive experience in data migration and integration using Data Loader
•	Integrated SQL database functions with Salesforce applications
•	Experience in capturing, analyzing and documenting requirements for Salesforce.com implementations
•	Sound experience in creating Custom Apps, Custom Objects, Custom Fields, Applying Sharing Rules, Page Layouts, Search Layouts, Related List and defining Field Dependencies, Custom buttons.
•	Compose case management process, lead conversion and Campaign influence.
•	Expert with Substantial Experience in Salesforce Administration, Operational Analytics, Project Management, and Quality Assurance with Emphasis on Process Improvement.
•	Experience in Sales force APEX Triggers, Tasks, Custom Objects Creation, and Visualforce.
•	Adequate experience on Debug Apex scripts using System Log Console and debugs Logs to catch Exceptions and execute Governor Limits.

-2012 was about customer outreach, with the Time of Use Rates coming into effect.  We needed to make phone calls to reach out to our customer to give them the information and offer ways to beat the TOU Rate change with doing energy efficiency projects.

-A valuable thing I learned about PG&E, is how their money is made. A big push from customers who think the increase in rates suffice PG&E money comes from them

-Management & Team Leads are not personal enough in some of the groups.  My last position was lead by a very hard working and thoughtful manager.  Some of management truly have there hands full wearing multiple hats while a good majority are too programmed with very little people skills and the ability to think out the box, while new ideas are sometimes frowned upon.

-My Co-workers were all about help, appraises and full of information.  While in some groups some are confined and content to the job, many others were looking to expand and spread there wings into other areas of the company.  Many would often stay in contact and give you some new and upcoming information.  You can always find a great group of people in this company.  My hat is off for my former colleagues.

The hardest part of the job is also the easiest part.  Placing phone calls to customers through-out the entire day.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Journeyperson lineperson 2 salaries reported	$68.54 per hour
Equipment mechanic 62 salaries reported	$64.58 per hour
Utility worker 92 salaries reported	$38.41 per hour
Mechanic 46 salaries reported	$62.49 per hour
Program manager 221 salaries reported	$155,257 per year

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