Demanding job with good pay but poor management in Philly
Pros
Good pay. Great benefits. Lots of overtime opportunities. Provides stability under most economic conditions, including recessions. Powerful union contract. THE JOB ITSELF: Very demanding. Very detail-oriented with a constant flood of work. Extremely research-oriented. A dream for anyone who is interested in tax-related topics and loves customer service. PORTLAND OREGON SITE is clean and has beautiful views of Portland, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Saint Helens. It has a decent in-office environment with decent, civilized people, most of whom are very hard working, even passionate, and genuinely want to serve the public. Offers decent training. Overall communication is good. Very responsive and competent management. Smaller Portland is a much friendlier, happier, and more enlightened town, Public transit compensation. PHILADELPHIA CAMPUS is a huge employer and has many more opportunities to diversify your resume, advance, and make lateral moves. Large campus allows more opportunity for physical movement. Much greater ethnic diversity than Portland. Larger Philadelphia provides access to many more local businesses and services. Free parking or public transit compensation.
Cons
Stability is vulnerable to government shutdowns and any rogue administrations who attempt to illegally take away employee rights and gut and defund the government. THE JOB ITSELF: Very demanding. Very detail-oriented with a constant flood of work. Extremely research oriented. A dread for anyone who has no interest in tax-related topics and detests customer service. Must stick to strict schedules, and often account for where you are and what you're doing— a dream for anyone who loves being treated like a child. Technical applications require using varieties of extraordinarily complex and esoteric codes. Much of the technology is archaic (the central database is literally from the 1960s). Procedure is determined by the Internal Revenue Manual, which is larger than an encyclopedia, extremely complex, always changing, and often unclear. Processes are often staggeringly bureaucratic and inefficient. Very, very, very easy to do something incorrectly and get blamed for it. Also, attempting to assist taxpayers from all over the country, both via phone and correspondence, brings to the fore just how unfathomably ignorant, foolish, incompetent, nasty, and helpless much of the American public is. PORTLAND OREGON SITE is smaller and more cramped than a major campus like Philadelphia. Few opportunities to walk around freely unless you leave the building and go outside. While the quality of management and employees is quite high, the price you pay is that many of them are like this because they fanatically buy all the propaganda presented to them by the employer, which makes them insufferably boring. PHILADELPHIA CAMPUS is a toilet. Monotonous, soul-numbing interior design. Not clean. Roaches and rodents are acceptable. Hygiene is for chumps. Bed bugs are a constant issue, with building management needing to employ extermination services on a regular, monthly basis. Overall communication is absolutely abysmal. A very large portion of employees are spitefully proud about being incompetent, rude, crude, uncivilized, lazy, stupid, vindictive, petty, aggressive, unhygienic, lying, thieving, useless sacks of idle flesh who deserve to be homeless, and would be if not for the government subsidizing their existence with employment. Management is largely the same, only more so, and charged with the responsibility of administering training that is invariably, repeatedly, and unquestionably the absolute worst training I have ever encountered or even heard of in my 37 years on the workforce (with dozens of different jobs).
