technician

inside sales representative

intern

senior software engineer

software engineer

World Wide Technology

I’ve been with this company for 4 years, and a FTE for 3. I used to love this job, the people involved, and the core values it stands for. But after multiple years of dealing with management’s consistently poor decisions, performance and planning, I’m facing the reality that this company, to its core, is soulless.

I started working at NAIC1 as a Wireless Technician in 2021. My title was stripped away due to competitive rates for said position because the company refused to compensate us for the market’s wages around the title; penny pinching when they made millions of dollars off a singular AT&T cabinet. Instead, we were listed as “Production Technician 2’s”, which is their highest paying position under the disaster zone of leadership/specialist positions. 

I loved the camaraderie I formed with them and genuinely loved my job at that time. My coworkers and my supervisors were all cool, and lenient despite AT&T’s strict agendas. This was until they got rid of the AWS shift entirely, and management gave us 0 guidance in the adjustment. It felt like they didn’t care and gave us little to no warning about an issue that would uproot our work/life balance. 

Coming to L4 (Cabling) in NAIC2 was a nightmare. The power dynamic was toxic and supervisors were micro-managing and hovering over your every move. Because I was considered a PT2, they all had assumed that I was well-versed in their work and gave me 0 training; this applied to their assumptions on every worker from NAIC1.

They’d pull everyone into a 9am meeting yelling about how we’re so behind on racks and that we’re on a time crunch, when these meetings would go on for almost an hour. Ironic. Not to mention - because I was considered “new” at NAIC2 (even though I’d been with the company 1.5 years), they gave me a ridiculously low 34 cent raise at the end of the year. 

Expect Mandatory OT in Cabling for 6-8 months out of the year. They don’t care about your work/life balance - they see you as a cog. L4 in general is not safe from unexpected waves of Mandatory OT.

Fast forward to now, im still working in NAIC2 in the L4 department. Those who worked alongside me in NAIC1 are long gone, working a different job or in a different department doing grunt work they’re all over-qualified for. I reported to a fantastic supervisor until management decided to move them into a different department. It’s been rough ever since.

I used to love this company, but management ruined it for me. They will throw you into a fire and tell you to embrace change, face reality, and stand on their IML pyramid telling you that there were “no surprises”. They weaponize their core values and penny pinch. They will make you think that they’re amazing because they hit “Top 10 in Fortune’s 100” and “Great Place to Work for 13 Years”, but it’s all to look good in the public eye. They try to make you feel like you’re a part of a “family” by providing food sometimes, but it’s just damage control for all their poor decisions they make on a daily basis.

Nothing is hard about this job. The coworkers helped keep me sane, making them the most enjoyable part of this job. The second most enjoyable thing would have been to never apply to this place.

If you enjoy having a life outside of work & feel like you have a purpose, do yourself a favor and AVOID WWT.

For many people this would be a good job. There are good benefits, they are flexible in multiple aspects, and they have a bunch of social gatherings. However, there are serious communication issues between departments. The team-building and trust exercises are very immature and pointless. People steal tools regularly. They are very shorthanded at the Edwardsville location. This is causing them to resort to making you work multiple positions other than the one you originally applied for and force you to work overtime. The pay is ok but when you take into account how much money you are saving the client that WWT works for on a daily basis, it's not even close to what level of work you are performing. The benefits are amazing but as a result your compensation will suffer. You get tiny yearly raises. The thing that has led me to seriously look at putting my two week notice in is the use of core values as leverage for disciplinary action or manipulating you. If you say you don't want to work in 2-3 positions/departments for the price of one they say you aren't being a team player or embracing change. In reality you only want to work at the position both you and the company agreed to during the interview. Yet where is their honesty and integrity when they notify workers that they are going to be working overtime that day in the last hour of their original shift. How can you trust them when they never mentioned working in positions other than the one you are applying for through multiple interviews or orientation. There are some extreme double standards at play there. The pettiness of some auditors is laughable at times. Instead of just replacing a faulty screw included in a kit they spend 5x the amount of time that would take to get pictures and document it in an email.

To sum it all up, they are pretty overwhelmed by being understaffed. They then try to get more out of employees than the job title they originally agreed upon. They use the wide array of core values as tools for manipulation while management doesn't adhere to many of those same tenets. Certain departments have a high turnover rate and one in the lab has driven it's workers to the point of exhaustion from being on overtime for several months now. If you are ok with jumping through hoops and drinking the koolaid you will be good to go. If you don't like overtime and petty social games, look elsewhere.

World Wide used to have a relaxed yet focused atmosphere in the NAITC.  I have watched our positions as Network Engineer turn from a lead role into just another production position. Engineers will no longer be required to have a CCNA and will be replaced with Technicians in time.  While the Networking Management has worked diligently to create a tier system to better align salaries with industry standards and a clear cut path for career advancement,  the Engineers were left out and eventually will be stripped of their titles. Currently we are approximately  15,000/year under paid by industry standards.  The WWT fix for that is to make them Technicians.  Under paid Engineer or well paid Technicians?  Yes WWT's growth has been explosive and painful at times but it's profits have exploded as well.  Of all the things that have changed I think the comradery that has suffered the most.  Our previous Manager was very approachable, down to earth and actually fought for us.  While the current manager has fought for some things he isn't approachable and is aloof.  While his outter appearance is one of a truly caring person whom has himself lived through many trials and tribulations he is in fact a poseur.  I have watched him "act" as if he was actually concerned about a fellow coworker, knowing the harsh reality they had been dealt over months, to giving them the axe.  Why wasn't more done to find out what they needed to be successful again? This person was an assett to WWT, worked seamlessly, had definite ambition, was compassionate, and didn't deserve the fate in which they were given.  I have lost all respect for my manager and the supervisors.  None of them cared less about our coworker.  At the end of the day they were just becoming a burden to WWT. And if this entire scenerio wasn't enough... They told them they would get unemployment benefits and WWT denied them.  How heartless! I have helped when and how I can but very few others have even reached out to them to see how they are doing showing how much "comradery" WASN'T there.That wasn't what the culture used to be.  We cared about each other TRULY.  Not just a facade!!  WWT is going down hill in its cuture and will not be on the Best Places to Work much longer!!!  I myself no longer look forward to coming in to  one of the best places to work.  It is just another production line.  I am and I know of some others who are looking to relocate our knowlege to other companies.

Your typical day at work is at least 9 or more hours of work expected in an 8 hour period with only a lunch for a break. The work day will be filled with redundant and useless meetings that should be emails. These meetings are not an off-set to the 9+ hours of work required. You will be given additional tasks throughout the day that are all high priority and expected to be completed as they are issued, on top of your regular work. You will be told over and over you are expected to clock out at 5:00pm,  but your work load will still be 2-3 hours more. You will be told there is an expectation of work life balance, but if tasks are not completed, you will be harassed about finishing tasks and diminished performance. You will receive upwards of 100 emails per day and be expected to read and review all of them for pertinent information despite repeated directions of ignoring things, "that don't apply to our department." Any time taken off results in an unclearable backlog of work, and you will have to work twice as hard to catch up, rendering PTO useless. Your management will tell you good job with a smile all while documenting daily performance and building a case for termination should you cause any friction within the company. Your systems and applications will be under constant maintenance, broken, or unavailable. applications will routinely freeze or crash, losing hours of work, and you will be blamed for not saving as you go, or backing up your work. Workplace culture is great unless you don't fit into the DEI boxes that are emphasized with annual training and reinforced in monthly meetings. Any discussions of workplace advancement or promotion will be met with discussions of budget constraints, no availability and lack of open positions. This will be proven false by others being promoted under nepotism related reasons such as familial connections or personal friendships. You will be force to constantly find work arounds for broken or down systems, expected to learn and keep up with monthly changes to SOPs, policies and procedures, and failure to do so will be met with threats of termination or Performance Improvement Plans. Non-protected employees are openly discriminated against, and investigations are not taken seriously by HR. Managers face no repercussions for their actions unless the company is financially affected. 

I could write a book on what’s it like to work here but I’ll keep it short and high level.

All companies will have pros and cons and all employees have different wants and needs. This is based on me. I put emphasis on hard work and an atmosphere that rewards.  If you want a few sentence summary it’s this. This company is not bad nor great. They fall somewhere in the middle and excel in some area while lacking in others. They are good at what they do and that is being a business to make a profit by negotiating low labor and material costs while up selling as much as possible to the end customer. Sad but it’s reality. Until the working class decides to pull together and push back together as one this is how it will be. 

A bit on the company from my perspective.

WWT is stable and I’m sure they will be around for a while. They serve big hitters in retail, banking, government and much more. They might(see my con as you will understand the might) also have excellent and affordable health insurance. Work/life balance will be dependent on your team and manager, not your position. I have colleagues in the same position working 7 hours a day and others 10-12. Same with management. Some are great, others not so much.

If these guys and gals would implement a rewarding pay structure and put the proper people in management they would really have something. Unfortunately the employees have been told this would happen for years now and it has not. I would have liked to see this happen as it would change my outlook on the company greatly. As it stands this place is not bad enough to jump ship immediately but not good enough that I don’t look for opportunities elsewhere.

I have been here 4 years, 5 if you include my time as a contractor Overall, this is a very unfulfilling place to work with a culture that promotes chaos. Pay is abysmal, management is constantly changing, and the culture here at WWT is unlike anything I have ever experienced before at a workplace. They force feed you these acronyms and business concepts and expect you to learn them, live them, and love them, and punish you if you do not. We have stand up meetings every week and just fire off these "culture" ideologies like a cult. Yearly reviews are actually weighted based on how much you know about WWT's so called "culture." You get a  "you have to think a certain way or else"  type of feeling here at WWT.  This company promotes itself as a great place to work, but this culture promotes "embrace change" far too much. Changing everything, all the time, is not working out very well. If you want proof of that just look at our plummeting ratings on Glassdoor. This is a great place to work for some, if you are in the right place with the right people. For the majority of the company, especially in the warehouses and the lab or engineering departments, it is far from a great place to work. You are often given workloads that are far out of your job description. You will be put in tough situations that you either sink or swim in, and you will not be compensated for your extra efforts, unless you consider the occasional company provided meal fair compensation. The only benefit of working here in the IT field is you will routinely be hands on with cutting edge equipment and very impressive enterprise gear, all of which looks very good on a resume. 

A lot of management, but not a lot of leadership. 

My department has 3 Production Managers. One is a nice person but overly ambitious to the point of being unrealistic, one is a complete rube who got to where they are by knowing the talking points and spewing out fortune cookie wisdom and positivity cliches, and the other is the most well rounded of the 3.
Supply Chain VP comes across as a bully, which totally contradicts the Great Place to Work For All agenda.

Career framework for my department is a joke. 

In the past month, we have been told in no particular order that insurance was going up after the 1st of the year, no End of Year bonus like last year, no Christmas party, no inline promotions, insulting raises, and the piece de resistance.....instead of adding staff to 1st and 2nd shift to remedy the ridiculous levels of burnout on all teams in our department, they are creating a 3rd shift in order to curb OT(costing some employees 10-15% of their annual pay in the process from the lost OT) Not taking into account that 3rd shift will not have the same level of support that 1st and 2nd shift have, which will leave 1st shift with even more rework than they already deal with.

Claims to be an industry leader, but follows 'market trends' for pay. We're told that sites like these are unreliable sources for salary information, but are celebrated when they honor the owner with awards. 
I've been there for 5 years and I've never seen morale this bad. I'm optimistic things will get better, but that will take upper management and executives 'facing reality' but since we're interchangeable warehouse staff, they won't bother. 

The Good:

A large company that encourages the use of the latest web dev tech. We are rewriting our AngularJS apps into Vue and replacing some REST APIs with GraphQL. Overall, devs have a lot of freedom to use whatever they want and try new things. You will probably work on a team with less than 10 people, half of them being developers. The environment is relaxed and stress free. It's very easy to work here for the rest of your life...depending on how well you fit in. 

The Bad:

The Good is also the Bad. You will be managed by people who don't understand technology. You have a lot of freedom, but developers don't communicate. Many people, even the CTO, come through the internship program, so there is a lot of recycled knowledge and old habits. Plain, mediocre developers are reaching senior and lead roles because of tenure, not because of skill. The business-y non-tech people kiss the ground these senior devs walk on, but the terrible spaghetti code, lack of forethought, ​and anti-patterns makes my life miserable. There are no systems in place to evaluate developer skill, because no one reads anyone's code. You will often work on a project after a senior dev and the code looks like something an intern would write. 10 years writing bad code does not make you a great developer. Years mean nothing. 

If you like to pump out questionable code and accrue a ton of technical debt and spend all your time fixing bugs caused by poor design decisions done by the senior and lead developers, then apply today. 

Also, the pay sucks. I was making 45% more as a contractor. 

Overall, the company has a clear direction and purpose that coincides with their core values. These core values are used as the foundation for the company at the highest levels but they tend to lose meaning when the reach the bottom. The positions at the bottom are not difficult work, but they leave much to be desired with the compounding minor frustrations. There is always room to grow but if you join this company, it would be best to do it after you've gained a good amount of professional experience or you may be stuck in a low position until you move on to another company.
I am currently attempting to push forward within the company but there have been a nearly endless stream of hurdles that seem to appear out of nowhere. It's nearly impossible to move from one entry level position to another and the company leaves professional development up to the responsibility of the individual. There are resources available, but most of these resources can be found freely on the internet, and the more complex occupations have resources scattered in a confusing web of non-applicable articles and training courses.

I am actively trying to improve both the company and the capacity of my role at the bottom for the rest of my peers, and I genuinely hope that I can change this review for the better in the future.

If you’re a temp they do not care about you unless you become a favorite. They will talk like conversion will happen after your 90 days but typically isn’t the case. Some people it’s 6 months some people it’s a year or two. They will switch you departments and buildings and schedules and tell you it doesn’t affect your conversion date but it definitely does and pretty much tells you to suck it up because of their “embrace change” slogan in their IML.  If you’re not a favored temp employee they will be nice to your face but then fire you out of the middle of nowhere after you leave work. They don’t even have the decency to tell you personally they hide behind their temp agencies to do that for them. If they don’t have a reason to fire you they will use whatever they can against you to push you out the door. Work ethic, attitude, and a willingness to learn is not something they actually value unless it’s perfection or again unless you’re a favorite. They pick and choose when to enforce what rules based off of who they like and don’t like. Most supervisors and managers are fake and the it’s very rare you get a good one. They will work their employees to the bone and do not give appropriate compensation. This is a company that screams that they care but hide behind their IML and benefits packages as an excuse to treat their workers like they don’t matter while the company profits millions a year. The higher up management is completely out of touch with what is going on in the warehouses that they manage. I do not recommend working here especially as a temp. 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Technician 6 salaries reported	$20.04 per hour
Inside sales representative 4 salaries reported	$58,750 per year
Intern 11 salaries reported	$21.55 per hour
Senior software engineer 6 salaries reported	$120,167 per year
Software engineer 6 salaries reported	$129,500 per year

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