Pacific Gas and Electric Reviews

I have been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – The company is large enough to allow employees to explore many departments in the energy space. Employees can spend their entire career with this one company.

Cons – As a government regulated company, with 100 year history and large in size, decision making can be sluggish and introductions of cutting-edge technologies especially for internal operations, takes more time that with companies in other industries.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at Pacific Gas and Electric as a contractor for less than a year

Pros – nice company to work for

Cons – a bit far from San Francisco

I have been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Large organization with opportunities to move to different roles depending on qualifications and organizational needs.
Incentive-based compensation.
Retirement plan options effective 01/01/14.

Cons – Very uncertain regulatory environment.
Missed merger opportunities in the past; several other combined utilities in U.S. now larger.
Considerable rate pressures driven by need to upgrade infrastructure and meet regulatory mandates.

Advice to Senior Management – Focus on Premier Survey Results improvement

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Pacific Gas and Electric as a contractor for more than a year

Pros – It's meaningful, interesting work with good people. Easy to roll up your sleeves and contribute right away.

Cons – Chaotic environment. "Not enough resources" really means a lack of focus, priorities, and accountability. Environment is not very encouraging or creative.

Advice to Senior Management – Set fewer #1 priorities, set a plan, and stick with the plan.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Pretty laid back, people are helpful and genuinely interested in helping if someone has a question. A lot of them have incredible knowledge since they've been around from the days of the main frame and when systems were being built

Cons – Too much paper work, too many processes. It's also far too top heavy and too many people supervising and not enough people doing work. Also, there are a budget issue and some people in supervisory positions mainly because they have been there for a long time and not because of any actual skill set.

Advice to Senior Management – Less paper work and more financial incentives are needed

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – The people on my team are great to work with
Great benefits--you pay only 7 percent of benefit costs and they have a pension

Cons – Not much recognition
My department is not staffed to up with the work
You make one mistake and you can never overcome it

Advice to Senior Management – Open and honest communication is not valued
Leaders need to do a better job of setting expectations and giving feedback

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Plenty of opportunities to change the current processes
Recognition for good work (if you make sure people know you're doing good work) through extra bonuses in your paycheck and fast promotion process
Some flexibility in the creativeness of your design (there's still an opportunity to improve here, but it is getting better every day)
Employee Engagement initiative is attempting to get employee's concerns heard to the upper management
Training opportunities are easily and painlessly approved (within reason of course!) Training budget is often underutilized.
Often get to go to events such as Oracle Open World
Many opportunities to exercise leadership skills even if you're not a supervisor (build lead on projects, etc)
Senior and Middle Management is approachable
Great location, right next to BART!

Cons – Very thin line between operations and development in my specific area. Programmers are on-call 24x7 whereas Operations only works from 8 AM to 8 PM and is not expected to recover jobs without the programmer's intervention (even for a simple failed file transfer due to network issues.) If it's a known issue and the recovery is documented, why get the programmer involved when he/she has a deadline on a project to meet?

Programmers who work on projects are then expected to maintain those programs after they go live instead of transitioning them to the support group as most IT shops do. Other parts of the IT organization have this balanced well but there is an opportunity to fix this issue for our specific reporting group.

Programmers tend to focus on their one area and refuse to let others learn their area as well. I think this is a holdover from the old culture before our most current re-org. It will remain a problem until people stop getting rewarded for knowing one, and only one, system.

Advice to Senior Management – Work to remove the blurred lines between developers and operations. Leverage best practices that have been set by the industry and other IT organizations within the company to achieve this goal.

The attempts to make our company's processes simpler are working. Keep at it! There's still a lot to tackle.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

I have been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than a year

Pros – Good benefits: 401k matching of 75% for up to 6% of salary; great leadership and career growth opportunities

Cons – bureaucratic. lots of levels of management and slow to make decisions.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time

Pros – Wonderful Company to work for.

Cons – No negative comments about the company

Advice to Senior Management – Learn the Star Model

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

I worked at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – None, terrible company that does business as a monopoly!

Cons – Company that does not value diversity!

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company