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There is one God. And it’s name is Phone Queue, which for brevity we will now call Q. Your whole life will be structured around Q. Notice I say life, and not day. Q determines when you can leave work. Q determines when you can take PTO. Q determines if you get to work on the other projects/assignments you have. Q even has power over when you eat, which is ironic, as it is ever hungry. Q does not care if you vomit on your coworker's desk or you have to take your spouse to the hospital. Q only cares about its daily pound of human flesh. Q can be merciful, but only if sated by the blood and tears of your fellow employees.
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I’ve been told there was a legendary time when program updates didn’t break the software you are supporting. The documentation from that time is still recorded on the stone walls within the smoker’s gazebo, chiseled in Ancient Sumerian. I think we were allowed to wear shorts back then, too.
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Some managers are better than others. This is common in all companies, but it does seem that some employees end up getting fired who would have made it on other teams. I’ve heard of insane micromanaging where every blip of inactivity is questioned and others have “allegedly” been cussed out, but I never experienced that personally.
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This job is often touted as a “foot in the door” for the rest of the company. This is solely dependent on our Dear Leader, Q. I saw multiple reps with applicable skills who got offered internships/opportunities in other departments get denied because Q couldn’t afford to let them go. In one of those scenarios, the rep knew only one product at the time so they would have only impacted one part of Q out of 20+ parts. This implies to me that these dangled opportunities will rarely happen. The foot in the door metaphor would be more accurate if they added “if pigs fly”, or even better, change the phrasing to “a foot in your rear to help you out the door”. In the company's defense, I understand the business reasoning behind not letting reps work in other departments, but the majority of those reps I mentioned earlier left and got jobs in their field at different companies after 2+ years of training at the company's expense. Such a waste.
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There is a high ceiling for advancement in this department. It is not impossible and once you’ve broken your chains, it gets easier to keep doing so. But just realize you will be competing against 50+ internal people per job posting. It’s not uncommon for someone completely unexpected (ie. they’re rather new) to get chosen for a role, but this would be a negative for the people who don’t get the job and have based their entire career on getting to that position. This is balanced by situations where they already have someone in mind for the role, but tell all the other applicants that they stand a good chance so they can get enough applicants to have the illusion that this was an unbiased process. This leads to a two week to two month process of interviewing where they’ll still go with the person everyone knew was going to get the job in the first place. These very common scenarios create a lot of uncertainty and resentment about promotions in the department which is channeled towards the company. The salt in the support department is real, and no amount of free food or lego stations can wash it away. To be fair, the interview process has always been inherently broken. You can’t tell if an applicant is going to be good at a role after looking at a piece of paper inflating their accomplishments, having a 45 min conversation where you ask about hypothetical scenarios that may or may not be relevant to the role, and where you get answers that may not even be true and can’t be verified. It’s absurd, and it’s best to revel in that absurdity. Otherwise you’ll lose your mind and start throwing coins into the urinals and wiping your snot on the bathroom walls. (The chaotic interview structure is probably common in other companies as well, but I don’t know if Thomson Reuters should be proud to be a part of that swamp.)
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You need to make a plan for what you want from the company as soon as possible. Not all product knowledge is valuable and applicable to other jobs. After mastering the customer service soft skills there is not much left to learn except for additional products. The issue is that these additional products will not necessarily help you advance to other parts of the company. It may help with some product specific roles and it will help you advance in the Support department, but if your interests lie elsewhere then it’s not worth it. Learning as many products as possible seems like a good way to get ahead. This is a trap. You will have a less flexible schedule with more stress for the same pay as everyone else. There is not one job that requires that many product knowledge bases (possibly Training/Consulting but even then I doubt you would be supporting everything). Those with IT aspirations should learn GFR, Web, and all the Systems. Those with an eye on a Development role should look at what products will have the most demand, generally a tax product or products in development. Professional Services tends to find more value with people who know GFR. Getting into the Operations or Content team requires some experience doing their work/job duties, which is only offered to those with passable metrics and product knowledge, and manager approval. Sales will look at anyone with some experience with sales. The reason this section is in the Cons, is that your manager or Operations can throw you into a training at-will, which can derail your career plan or give you irrelevant work which gives you less time to do things that will actually have an impact on your future. I see perfectly good reps with solid metrics start to flounder when they get overburdened or disillusioned. These reps usually leave in any way possible (ie. MyPay).
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A silver bullet mentality. Everything looks like a nail when you just got a hammer. This is especially apparent with the company’s attempt to turn every team into one based around Agile. Agile makes more sense in an Agile role where there is a finished Agile product rather than in a call-center environment. If I had heard the word Agile one more time, I was going to Agile myself out the second floor window. But the big man in the big chair championing the system said that this will allow the company to save more money and stop the hemorrhaging of the department, so obviously they are an informed, innovative thinker. You could also try sending him your credit card information and social security number and he’ll send you back a routing number for a Nigerian bank. Expect to hear industry buzzwords all the time with people nodding their head in excitement. But don’t look into anyone’s eyes when they do it. They’ll be black and lifeless, like a doll’s eyes. You know how you can tell when you’re in their meeting, Chief? When you hear them say blockchain unironically.
