Accept employment here at your own risk, as a last resort. - Network Engineer Black Line IT Employee Review

While I fully understand the nature of an MSP has its swings in workflow, you will forever be plagued by a few "monkeys on your shoulder" working here. This is true when work is bountiful and plenty, as well as when there are large downtime windows. Allow me to elaborate on the above quoted. Work culture, be prepared to step back through the doors of high school walking into this office. Don't allow the friendliness, facades or initial impressions fool you. You will have a few weeks of active engagement learning the tools that you will be utilizing, and all might seem well at first. However, you will soon notice this is an organization where the core members are friends, college buddies, family members, etc., and you will start to feel that long lost "clique" feeling. You'll never be "in" with the core players, and anyone intelligent enough can see right through the after work beer invitations, hand shakes, jokes, etc. For example, early in my tenure I was approached by another engineer who made bold claims about his role and stake within the organization. This led to a long impromptu meeting with this individual, which then prompted other team members scolding my lack of work for this particular day. In the end, weeks later there was a conference room meeting with the partners and myself, where I had explained what had happened, and I was told verbatim "I believe what you are saying, but this other employee would never say that". Needless to say, this other employee was "in" with the partners/seniors where I was not, and in essence I was told that I had lied about my claims regarding this event. The real question here is, why would I lie about this situation, what could I possibly have to gain from this? In fact, it was later revealed that I was correct about the character of this other individual, and he would soon leave and file a lawsuit against Black Line. At the end of the day, it will become immensely evident that Black Line only cares about their bottom line, and you are simply there to accelerate them towards their profoundly large aspirations. Time entry, there is no argument that time entry is a necessary record management tool in this industry, but Black Line takes it to another level. Be prepared to complete a minimum of 8 hours daily on your timesheets. They do receive credit because they will allow you to sign up for a vast amount of various trainings, certifications, etc., but these items are not openly given or suggested to you. You will find yourself constantly fumbling through your day in a state of panic thinking "my timesheet is short, what do I do?". You will ask peers and seniors for work and will constantly be met with "I have nothing". The operations team and seniors will be on your back to ensure you have 40 hours per week filled in. However, if no one is openly engaging you, inviting you, suggesting to you, items that you can sign up to train on when there is downtime, or bringing you in for different shadowing opportunities, how will you ever know how to fill in your 8 hours/day 40 hours/week? Well, you won't. In fact, there are many employees, myself included, that 99% of the time worked through lunches, or worked an extra hour or two daily just to satisfy their timesheet. The reason for this is that it became easier to fulfill 8 hours daily when working longer. Bathroom breaks, side conversations in the office, an email to a client, an email to internal staff, shadowing other engineers, reaching out to clients and leaving voicemails, all these items and many, many more draw you further away from being able to successfully log 8 hours of time daily. The common response was "you can multitask, or some tickets only take 5 minutes but you will log 15 minutes", etc. After years with this company, this became exhausting, overwhelming and draining. Imagine a team that only reaches out to you because you performed a function of your job incorrectly (lacking timesheet when work was insufficient), but never reaches out to you to congratulate you or say thank you? A 37 hour timesheet will be highly scrutinized, but when you are engaged on a large project and have a 60 hour week, there will be no simple "thank you" or "good job". To put the icing on the cake that is time entry, the operations team has on numerous occasions, to multiple staff members, gone behind the scenes and manipulated employee timesheets with their PTO or vacation days, on days that they were actively working, for 9-10 hours. Imagine working a 9+ hour day, and feeling stressed from repercussions because of a lacking timesheet, not because you aren't doing your job but rather because the seniors are unable to provide enough work, and someone is filling in your short timesheet with your paid time off days. That can't be legal, right? Work life balance, they claim to strive for a healthy work life balance, in fact, it is one of their core values "Happy to come to work" and "Happy to leave". Unfortunately when you find yourself included in the very short rotating on-call schedule, supporting large clients such as 6am-9pm call centers, you will soon find yourself not feeling like you were happy to have left work. To top it off, there is a vast amount of information you need to obtain to do your job well, especially for after hours calls, and account owners/seniors are informed to be available to assist, but just like during your 8-5 workday, you will find most of the time no one is available in the evenings or weekends when you need assistance. While others are "happy to leave" and enjoying their lives, you will be either at home or close to a computer ready for the next call. In addition, you will constantly be met with conflicting information between seniors and the operations team, that will leave you in a constant state of confusion and second guessing. Sure, there are written policies for you to review, but I am referring to all the in-between items that become evident during your employment here. One person might make a comment such as "don't worry if your timesheet is short, work will pick up soon and you'll be so busy it will be a non-issue" or "you don't need to handle every single after-hours call, you can go out, live your life, take calls from your phone and for minor issues inform the client it will be handled next business day". While other team members might say "your timesheet needs 40 hours, it is short, you need to fix this" or "if you are on call, you need to be near a computer and handle every call that comes in". These examples are just a small subset of the amount of conflicting information you will receive from higher ups, and the amount of dishevelment that takes place. Black Line is already framing their house, and they haven't even poured the concrete. Advocating for change, with all of the above mentioned topics, including far more unaddressed items, Black Line claims to be an organization where ideas, struggles, complaints, issues, or concerns can be brought to the attention of the partners and seniors in order to promote change. This simply is not true. The only medium you are given to address said items, are quarterly checkpoints with your assigned senior. I also recently asked "why doesn't Black Line attempt to work more as a collective unit, why don't we have recurring meetings to address common complaints? We certainly have the tools and means to, there is no reason (remote or in office) as a company we need to operate on our own individual islands and lack the availability to collaborate and truly hear the voice of the people." The answer to this was "that's what the yearly Christmas party is for, or the summer BBQ". If management cannot differentiate between a time and place for celebrating accomplishments, achievements, growth and new members of families, versus a time and place for collaborating for change and growth, this should paint a clear picture where the priorities lie. Personally, I had been regurgitating the same concerns quarter after quarter with no major visible improvement. I do admit some minor items were addressed over time, however, the core, bulk, crippling items were never addressed. These items were constantly met with "we hear you, these are concerns of many other staff members, we will look into it". This was the same story year after year. Eventually, most attempts to formulate these conversations were met with partners interrupting your time to speak with interjections such as "we've tried to make changes to these items but cannot because of XYZ" or "hey, if you have a better idea for how we can implement these policies, we're all ears". No. The bulk of the employees, whom of which are not partners, seniors, or owners, are not responsible to educate these persons on how to make the work environment "bearable". We are not paid to wear those hats and we are not vested. We have been voicing our concerns and struggles for years, as a collective group, new and old employees, and the commonality of those voices have fallen on deaf ears. Services rendered, this is an extremely disappointing topic to speak on, one that always bothered me to my core. I personally, over the years, found countless events where Black Line was promising (and charging) for services, most notably on-premise and offsite backups as well as 24/7 network monitoring, that were never deployed. In some instances, there had been up to a year, or more, in these gaps of services. When I brought this to the attention of others, the reply was always "I can't believe this happened, can you take care of it, we will talk to the other engineers about it". There were never any future discussions, meetings, reviewing of clients, policy changes, distribution of roles, nothing implemented to prevent these occurrences from continuing to surface. In this day and age where a single misclick, from a single user, has the potential to cripple an entire customer network, resulting in the need for a complete disaster recovery restore process, allowing these networks to go months or longer without successful backups is not living up to the "gold standard" that they claim to promise to clients. I myself, used to manage and monitor all backups, network monitoring, and other proactive services for roughly 40 clients. This always brought a sense of "if I am the one in charge of these items, I know it will be handled correctly". However, as always will be the case with a seemingly broken time entry policy as noted previously, my ability to manage these services was stripped and handed to other employees. The reason for that being "too many people are spending too much time on these items, we cannot have you continuing to use the "internal bucket" tickets". Of course, it makes complete business sense to remove roles and responsibilities from capable individuals, only to shuffle those items to other employees without the same technical ability? Don't get me wrong, these other individuals did a fine job monitoring and logging said items, but there was no break fix process, only disjointed group emails, regarding these items. Please don't be a customer okay with dishing out thousands per month to a company that you are entrusting with the safety of your network, knowing there is a strong likelihood that you will not be receiving the services you are paying for. Would you take your vehicle to the same mechanic for routine oil changes, knowing they're charging you, but never actually replacing it? Exiting employment, if we circle back to the beginning referencing the cliqueness of the work culture you will experience here, you will promptly realize how little you meant to this entire organization should you ever decide to part ways. It is my belief, that if you spend 5+ years of your life pouring your heart and soul into the work that you perform, countless late evenings to take care of customers because you truly want to achieve work above and beyond the call of duty, that there should at least be some form of respect, appreciation, and judge of character between employee and employer. Unfortunately, you will not find that here. As soon as you decide to stop serving this organization, take charge of your future, and choose to look out for yourself instead of Black Line, you will be immediately discarded. Your exit will result in immediate termination without pay. All unused PTO (vacation) will not be paid out regardless of Illinois law requiring it to be. Prepare yourself for this company to show you how small of a fish they truly are as they attempt to write their own rules, nothing will be done by the book here. For any newcomer, this may be a reasonable place to get your feet wet and transform your blank slate into real world technical IT skills, but be wary and cautious and do not get too comfortable. Proceed with caution if you choose to work here. Remember that life is short, and do not allow yourself to succumb to the frustrations and mental abuse you will experience here. Do not be afraid to venture out for something greater in your path should the opportunity arise. Know that quitting doesn't mean that you have failed, it means that you have accepted that the mountain you stand before is unclimbable. Quitting is the new starting. There are other mountains out there capable of being climbed, ones that the people already at the top will reach down and provide you a hand up.