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NSC Global Brno, AT&T, Czech Republic
I came with the first round of people here. In the beginning everything was ok, because we were on probation and according to the contract you sign with them, the probation is for 3 months and you can leave whenever you want during that time, but after that you have to stay 2 months prior to leaving if you want to quit. So everything was perfect during that period, they were afraid not to lose people, but after that, I feel sorry that I came here. But soon I will leave.
So, the situation changed in the mean-time. So, before reading on, let me tell you a piece of advice don’t come here if you want a networking career or if you want to be humanely treated, you’ll be very very very disappointed.
NSC is a subcontractor of ATT, so you are not directly employed by ATT. So even though you work in the same building, at the same desks with the ATT employees, you do not have the same rights.
Most of the team-leaders and the managers are ATT employees. You don’t want to know how much they care about the NSC employees. Imagine that the team-leaders are max. 23-24 years old, they have no management skills, they have no networking experience, they have only the high-school, no certification, nothing, I just wonder how did they end up what they are – maybe because they are natives, don’t know...
You also wouldn’t want to know about the work overload, barely 60 people working with thousands of customers, some working in 12(!!! – you don’t wanna know how that is) hour shifts with 10% (!!!) more income if you work on nights, and some working in other shift patterns , night not included so that they don’t have to pay you as the ones who work in the night shift. We were all promised all kinds of certifications paid by the company, it turned out that they will pay them, if they want, but only two years after you pass the exam.
Basically, the work you do is not that what they pompously call in their job offer as Network Engineer/Specialist, but Helpdesk/Hotline or Agent as they like to call it. You have to call all day long the customer to restart the routers and the modems, or tell them how to install/uninstall some software from the PCs, so not really Cisco stuff, don’t you agree? The nice job is done by the other people from the ATT. However they demand you to have any kind of Cisco certification because they force you to register your Cisco certificate with NSC, and so the more Cisco Certs they have the higher the discount from Cisco for them.
Over hours are not paid even though you are unwillingly forced to stay overtime, because you have to be logged in your phone continuously for 8 hours, and if at the end of the shift, just in the last minute, the customer calls you cannot hang up in his face, or not answer the call – you’ll most surely get fired. You cannot also leave earlier next day because you stayed over-time. You cannot take breaks, if you are not from the ATT, or if you are not ’’friend’’ of the team-leaders. So excepting the 30 minutes lunch break, you are forced to stay 8 hours in front of the PC and call the customers. They are doing weekly reports regarding your productivity – every hotline aspect is taken into consideration – how many calls you had that week, how you spoke to the customers, how did they react – they don’t care about your networking knowledge, because you don’t need it in this kind of job.
Many people think of leaving, because of the work-overload, because new customers keep coming, because of the new over-whelming responsibilities, because of the lack of any sort of opportunities – career wise, moneywise, whatever wise ...
Some of them even think of quitting altogether. We have received some kind of hotline-training and pseudo-networking (I guess CCENT is equivalent to Oxford compared to this one) in the beginning (this was the moment when I had doubts about this job), from a 22 y.o. German guy, he doesn’t even know what an interface is, he has no knowledge of networking, but he is ATT employee – hard-working guy, like all the team-leaders, taking breaks every 10 minutes. He has no knowledge of anything, networking or not.
Let me tell you the working day of a team-leader – come to work at 8:30 (work begins at 8), start the monitoring program, see how up-to-the-sky the productivity of the agents is, tell them to work more, more, more, it is not enough, open your web-browser and start Facebooking. If you are an Indian team leader(there is one only), come even later, go to YouTube and start browsing for Bollywood movies, all day-long. Every now and then remember people that they are not productive and they should work more, that the lunch break is not compulsory ...
Of course, you tell them every now and then to some of them that they are the best and when going out for a smoke for the 20th time that day with the other team-leaders talk to each other about how the stupid inside think they are the best, because they peted them.
If you dare to open your web-browser to check your email, don’t worry, a report will be generated for that, if you go to toilet too often or not, the same, if you want to stop the air-conditioning because it is too cold, don’t worry, no chance – the team-leader will make sure you won’t ...
Holidays can be taken when they want – so don’t hope you will spend you summer on vacation, or the winter holidays at home. That is reserved for the team-leaders and for their ’’favorites’’.
So think again .... before going to Eastern Europe
One more thing I forgot, there was one 60 years old guy from Spain, retired network engineer, he had LOTS of knowledge, he worked all his life in networking, they hired him, he moved to Brno, found an apartment (here you sign a rent contract for a year, and you have to pay all the money back if you leave earlier) – they fired him because he dared to complain about changing the shifts from one week to the other without any notice according to the mood of the team-le