Q&A With Pacific Gas and Electric Employees

Good for those who do no more than the minimum amount required. For skilled employees, I often saw them working extended hours and weekends with no overtime pay.

Politics and seniority.

There were no benefits for contractors, so I cannot answer.

In my experience with the IT department, they have very few remote direct hire positions as many of their management systems cannot be accessed outside the PG&E's physical network. Customer Care IT recently started outsourcing a lot of project work to overseas IT farms and some of the more junior development and QA positions are located in India.

I worked as a contractor in the San Francisco office on a team within the Business Technology group. The management style is very hierarchical and bureaucratic. Most of the employees' I interacted with primary driver seemed to be fear of job loss. In addition, atmosphere I observed was very political. A lot of lip service was given to collaboration and streamlining of processes, there was even an ongoing initiative called Superfit to implement those process and cultural changes. In reality, the bureaucracy and politics stayed the same and in some departments even increased. The processes, technology and tools being used in IT are incredibly out of date; and many in management have been there for a decade or more with no training or experience in modern application development. There was also a move to offshore a lot of IT functions, primarily development & testing. Very little planning and change management accompanied that effort, so the environment was at times chaotic and negative.