Hostile work environment that can provide solid entry-level work experience - Mac IT Specialist DeepTech Employee Review

They underpay and don't offer much opportunity for advancement. You also have to hear about how there's no talent in IT, when they're offering peanuts for a difficult skillset to come by. Craig, the CEO, exhibits a lot of the same behaviors as my mother, who suffered from borderline personality disorder. He lacks either the capacity or the will to self reflect. He is the kind of person who will yell at you in front of a room full of people, and will blame the shame he feels on your response to him. One time mistakes which have been discussed and eliminated were brought up several times after several months. I was told that it is okay for Ann, the CFO and "HR department" to yell at me, because she co-owns the company. Upon my dismissal, I asked Craig if he believes it is appropriate for him to yell at me, and he said "yes." There is an "open door" policy and unmaintained poor documentation of policy and procedure, but if you ask Craig something he thinks you should've figured out on your own (even during training), you will be met with contempt and derision. I have been on-site and relayed questions from customers to Craig, and his responses were condescending to me. If you bring ideas to the management that implies that they did not come up with the perfect solution to something, they frequently respond with aggression and take a defensive posture. DeepTech presents itself as doing things the right way, but policies are well below enterprise level. They have entry-level knowledge of DNS, and I was reprimanded for adding SPF records to a domain that had email bouncing. In the face of client data loss, the management blamed the hardware manufacturer, when by all rights the company managing their IT should've considered the necessity of backups. As a tech, you are responsible for the cost of your toolkit, which could be replaced with the income from a single billable hour of your labor. Furthermore, the management balks at purchasing anything. DeepTech is an authorized Mac repair shop, and they lack laptop power supplies, trilobe screwdrivers, and other tools necessary to perform that function. The entire time I worked there, we had RJ-45 nibs that were defective and would fall out of jacks, which I brought to the attention of management several times, vainly enduring Craig and Ann's incredulity and condescension. I requested a box of stranded network cable for when we make patch cables, and the first excuse was that we try to use prefab patch cables (which turned out to be about 10% of the time) and the second excuse was that we got rid of it because people didn't like working with it. Allow me to remind you that DeepTech takes pride in doing things right, and there is an industry standard that prescribes the use of stranded vs solid-core cable. This resulted in unprofessional and unreliable installations which I would never take credit for. DeepTech allows clients to do inadvisable and mildly illegal things because it's too much of a hassle to address, which is the opposite of what you want from IT consultants. Since my dismissal, the only reference to DeepTech I have encountered accentuated this image as a reactive rather than proactive company. Craig is an amateur grey hat social engineer who loves playing counter terrorism detective extraordinaire. And yet from a security standpoint, DeepTech has laughable password policies for clients and litter every client's office with our stickers, so if someone performs one-off work at any of our sites, they have an actionable attack vector for at least dozens of multi-million dollar businesses throughout Manhattan. On bringing up the password thing, it was shrugged off as "yeah, we're moving away from that." Luckily, DeepTech has clients sign a password that absolves them of all liability. Craig is also very much a money driven classist, and given the low salaries he pays, you should be able to infer how much respect he will extend to you. On the other hand, anyone with shiny objects or money commands his rapt attention. He talks down about people from Queens even though he's from Florida. He down about clients who can't understand computers, even highly successful people. He even makes awkward and tired gay jokes whenever the opportunity is afforded, despite the fact that he lives and works in Chelsea. As for office morale, it is pretty decent due entirely to the techs. However, there's a board that tracks progress in the form of open cases. Due to the nature of reality, more cases will be opened almost every day for a week or two, then when there is breathing room, cold cases will be followed up on, duplicate cases merged, etc. Despite the fact that we can see the board and the red number showing us our progress, Craig will come out periodically to mention that we're falling behind. This runs counter to the impression he gave during the interview process of how metrics were used. As indicated in the title, it's a hostile work environment. Ann and Craig play out their relationship drama in front of everyone, and employees play the role of the children in a dysfunctional family led by an abusive dictator with low emotional intelligence.