You buy all your own tools.
Health, Dental, and Vision insurance costs an arm and a leg.
The scorecard changes and can be very confusing. Learning to understand how the scorecard works is THE hardest part of being an installer. A single customer can wreck havoc across multiple metrics. Managements response is almost universally "Didn't do enough customer education" if it was a bogus service call, like you had a crystal ball to let you know the customer would rearrange their living room 3 days after you installed it and then call in after they couldn't get it connected back up.
Piece Rate. Amazing when you are busy and have a $400+ day. Heartbreaking when the season slows down and you have a $35 day. There is no base salary but pure commission. You do get paid for meetings but 2 hours a week at $16/hr isn't going to save your check in the midwinter slump.
Long hours. You work until your jobs are done. Sometimes that is 1:30 and you go home early. Sometimes you don't make it home until after 9pm.
Long drives (market depending). Sometimes you have a close tight route near home (I once had an entire day where I only put on .25 miles) but usually you are driving. Not just people in your home city want TV and you have to go where they are. I used to drive 80 miles one way every day to work in a city where no techs lived since I was the geographically closest technician. Typically once you get to where you are working your drive times are much smaller between jobs but sometimes volume is low and you go where the work is even if it's out of your "radius".
In an effort to stay in the black they are taking on other contracts with very mixed results. Some big markets are doing well enough to have dedicated techs for the other business lines but in most it's just a hassle both for the techs who often get driven out of their normal areas to do said jobs, and also the other techs who now have to try and cover the work that was originally scheduled on the business line tech.
Finally we get to the biggest Con of them all and the reason this is only a 1 star review. AT&T.
-They're forcing a mandatory change in software used to process work orders. Instead of an app that worked smoothly they made a WEBSITE that treats you like a 5 year old and never wants to work correctly.
-They make broken work orders and then when you call in to get it fixed get told "Oh, the group that can fix that is closed right now since they don't work weekends, you'll just have to come back a different day."
-They completely removed troubleshooting from call reps so things that used to get resolved over the phone now get turned straight into service calls (and straight onto your scorecard) for things like wrong input on the customer's TV.
-They make bogus service calls to do things that field technicians can't do, like ordering HBO.
-Currently undergoing massive gear shortages projected to last into next year.
-Forcing the garbage Genie2 onto every customer who calls in.
-The second they got to make their own contract they slashed the rates they paid DirectSat.
-When some of our customers with older (standard definition) equipment where having issues they flat out told us that they don't care about those customers.
-They don't cancel work orders when you call in to cancel them. Techs roll out on jobs that the customer has called in repeatedly to cancel and they just note the account and leave it on the schedule, wasting technicians time and money.
-Changed the way metrics worked at an office (not tech) level leaving offices scrambling to keep from going "Breach" (of contract) with ridiculous goals that can only even be close to met in the slow season.
