Pros
The branch level isn't bad. I worked with a lot of really good guys, my branch manager being one of them. That's pretty much it.
Cons
Pay - I can only speak as a technicIan. Your pay is a percentage of the service price you do with no base salary. That means your pay depends on 2 things: the price the salesperson sold the service for, and whether or not the customer actually allows you to do the service. We come into work at 7am and they have time windows as late as 5-9 pm. That means if you have 16 stops on your route, 6 cancel (which I've seen) and your last customer with a 5-9 time window doesn't want you showing up till 7 (which I've seen) as a beginner tech you can look forward to making around 90 dollars after working over a 12 hour day. On top of that, if one of your customers schedules a reservice, you lose half the money you made doing the regular service...regardless if the reservice was even needed. Benefits - no 401k (yet), Humana Healthcare and no dental provided. No paid sick days. No holidays, and after working with edge for a whole year, they reward you with one single paid day off. Better hope you don't have a death in the family or you'll have to choose between mourning and putting food on the table. We were literally told to "spend wisely" over the holidays because of all the unpaid days we get off around that time. Got a family to provide Christmas for? Sorry. Micromanagment- the branch managers get a text if we go over 70mph in the work vehicle, they get a text if the engine idles for more than 15 minutes too. During the winter we can leave the engine running if the temp is below 32, but that's to keep the lines from freezing and not for comfort, so look forward to hot hot summers. They also do what they call "sneak attacks"...where they park down the road and watch you do a service without you knowing. Where I can understand trying to manage your employees you can only treat them like liabilities for so long before they don't feel appreciated. Training- we have mandatory training every morning. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Eh. The majority of the training consists of customer interactions and not the services themselves...and just last week everyone in my branch was handed a list of things edge could fire all us for as training. You spend your first week riding with a trainer learning various services...but the likelihood of you getting to see every service edge offers in action is slim to none, so look forward to being sent to jobs with not knowing what to do Routing- you're promised a route in the area you live during the hiring process but it took a couple months before I wasn't having to drive an hour after my route just to get home. Makes the whole Micromanagement regarding letting your engine idle so you'd have a cool/warm truck to get into after your service seem redundant. They wanna save fuel costs but send you an hour away from where you live for services. The call center: the level of communication with the call center between the customers and techs is ridiculous. I've gone to initial services that cancalled because the call center did not make the customer aware that there is a term obligation. That's drive time and money out of whatever techs pocket that happens to. Not to mention, the lack of knowledge the call center has about what the techs actually do. Remember how I said if your customer schedules a reservice after you do their regular service, you lose half the money you made? Well I've literally gone to a reservice to re-granulate a customers yard with granular insecticide because someone at the call center told that customer that it would work against the worms their dog had. That's right...parasitic worms inside their dogs body. Someone lost half their money from their original service there because someone at the call center didn't know the difference between parasitic worms in an animal and worms that actually live in the ground.
