TL;DR: Summit, specifically the C-suite, Senior VPs, and HR, will lie to you, underpay you, take advantage of you, overwork you, and ignore any feedback that isn’t overwhelmingly positive. Summit's senior leadership expects their employees to live, breathe, and die for the company in exchange for 20% below average wages and a mug with the Summit logo on it.
-HR in particular likes to make verbal promises that appear to be in good faith, but when you follow up, HR will ask “do you have that in writing?” or “show me where I promised that”.
-Middle and lower-level managers will be ignored when they voice concerns or advocate for their teams. These managers are not given any actual control over their direct reports, team direction, or where they spend their budget. Upper management rules everything with an iron fist through a thin illusion of managerial independence.
-Summit does not allow employees to negotiate their hiring salary or benefits. This might not be a problem if they were consistent, but they’re not. Two employees with similar experience hired for the same job will not be paid the same. Often, a candidate who knows somebody higher up in Summit will make substantially more than even their more experienced counterparts.
-To cover this, my manager was always sure to remind me “we don’t discuss HR-related information" (really meaning compensation and pay). He would always be sure to remind me verbally as putting this in writing would be illegal. I received this reminder every time I was given a raise or I discussed my pay with my manager.
-Summit leadership sets the company's gain share bonus goals each year. In addition to the standard “business growth” goals, there are goals frontline employees have no ability to influence (like employee turnover). That doesn’t stop leadership from blaming their frontline staff when these goals are missed.
-Relating to the gain share: Summit leadership likes to brag to staff about how much money is in the gain share pool for bonuses. Just because money is in the pool does not mean it's given to employees. Often the vast majority of funds are not distributed because the business misses some goal set by leadership.
-Most days you will feel like Summit is actively trying to run you into the ground and burn you out. Almost every department works more than 40-hour weeks with many topping the 50-hour mark. Salaried employees on teams like Information Security, Application Development, and IT Operations should expect to see at least one 60+-hour week every month or so.
-Several managers expressed their views that a 45 to 50-hour week is what they expect to see from their teams during my time there. No allowances are made for incident response, long project workdays, or on-call issues. Working a 14-hour day on Monday does not buy you any leniency on Tuesday or the rest of the week. While this can be an occasional occurrence at many jobs, at Summit it is the norm.
-Leadership is constantly telling you to “pace yourself” or to “take some time away if you’re feeling stressed”, but this is undercut by the tremendous workload, a never-ending flood of priority tasks, and emergency changes caused by management’s shortsightedness and lack of planning. When you ask how you’re supposed to take time away, or who will cover your workload, there is never any answer.
-Be prepared to hear things like “we have to do more with less”, “sometimes you just need to buckle down”, “you gotta do what you gotta do”, and “I know it’s hard now, but it will get better” just about every day. There are never any slower days. There is never time to catch up on work. The best you can hope for is “I didn’t fall too far behind today.” I found myself working almost every night and weekend to try and catch up or “get a jump” on the next week’s workload.
-Regardless of inflation, how good you are at your job, how you improve yourself professionally, or what management may or may not have promised you, raises will not be above 6%. A promotion is not a guarantee of a raise either. Summit likes to hide promotions under the cover of “lateral movement” or will simply not mention pay in hopes the employee will forget about it.
-Most responsibility creep results from one “special exception” which then just becomes part of your daily duties. Within six months you’ll likely find your job has expanded to include the work that should be handled by two other people. Summit refuses to spend the money on an appropriately sized staff and everyone besides leadership pays the price.
-Summit leadership also likes to “reorganize” departments periodically when problems get too big. This allows them to give everybody a new job title and set of responsibilities. In reality this is an ultimatum: sign the “I’ll do more work for the same money” paperwork or we will consider this your voluntary termination.
-Raises are "competitive" within teams. Each year, each team is given enough money for all members to receive a 4ish% raise. For you to receive a 5% raise, somebody else on your team can only get a 3% raise. This turns your coworkers into competitors instead of teammates.
-There is no interest from leadership in fixing the company’s mountain of technical debt. There is no desire to address the company-wide morale issues. Middle managers are not given the tools required to retain talented employees in any department and are then blamed for high staff turnover.
Summit breeds a toxic work environment where employees cannot trust their managers to get anything done (despite many managers’ sincere desire to make positive changes), employees cannot trust HR to be on their side (because HR only exists to gaslight staff into thinking they’re the problem), and they cannot trust the company to care about them (because leadership only seems to have an interest in keeping “yes men”).
