New Job Oppurtunity

[comp2 1]

Ok so I received a new job opportunity today with Comcast. I am excited about this job, however was wanting to know if any of you guys have ever worked for them and what it is like.

 

I know the benefits are great including free cable and internet. And the insurance packages look nice as well.

 

Of course they are going to show all the pros of the job, but what are the cons. What are the dirty secrets about working for this company I need to know. I don't trust glassdoor any more. Their reviews are usually filled with junk but you guys are typically brutally honest.

 

Thanks again guys

Eric

[sheepdog 10]

Congrats on the new job oppertunity!Honestly, every single job out there has it's good and bad points. It is of course, in your best interest to look at the big picture, which I'm sure is what you are trying to do by inquiring here to see if anyone else works or has worked for them.

You need to look at not only the salary, but take a good look at the benefit package too. Free cable and internet is great, but if you can't make your house payment or rent on the money you make, homeless people don't have much need for free cable. Do take a close look at the insurance that is offered. But besides the money, check into what oppertunities the company offers for advancment. Check out those other benefits too, like paid vacation time and sick days and the ammount of time you have to work to gain these benefits.

Good luck with your new job if you do decide to accept it.

[k_nitin_r 8]

While on the subject of house payments and rent, I was wondering if anyone on the forum lived in an RV or trailer. Apparently, they say that living in a trailer part is a great way to save on cash. I think you would need some really good weather to get by without air conditioning because whatever one would save on rent would be spent by having to generate one's own electricity by getting a diesel generator and burning lots and lots of diesel. In one report, it is said that leaving a car engine running for ten to fifteen minutes is just about as much as what you would need to drive for a distance of two kilometers (of course, they assume you would be driving something like a Suzuki Swift with a diesel engine of under two litres generating about eighty horse power). Given that a fuel tank capacity is around twenty five for smaller cars and it consumes a tenth of a litre of fuel in ten to fifteen minutes, one would be using up less than a liter of fuel in an hour so eight litres of fuel should get one through the night and that would be followed by a trip to the office or to the mall. Having to fill up half the fuel tank on every single day and having to pay for more frequent oil changes because of the longer running of the vehicle's engine is bound to cost more than the rent for a small apartment. In a way, you could say that being home-less costs you more than if you had a home. There is the possibility of living in a space where you get electricity off the city's electric grid and that would definitely make it a whole lot cheaper because you can hook up to the power supply whenever you are parked and can pay regular subsidized electricity rates for electricity generated from coal powered power stations instead of burning diesel in a portable diesel generator.

[sheepdog 10]

Haven't lived full time in an RV, but we have one and use it for several weeks at a time when we are on vacation. Gasoline generators are not very fuel efficient when it comes to making electric. And even if you have a propane refrigerator and heat, those small bottles of propane are 10 times higher in cost than to have a large propane tank filled. So having a smaller space is probably not more cost effective than having a regular size home or apartment. Of course, it's a lot easier to move when you are in an RV if you don't like your neighbors!

[k_nitin_r 8]

I have been looking into the benefits of designing a mobile computer network, with servers being light enough to move out into a van when shifting base and deploying it again with little effort. My search for such computer hardware led me to the Eurocom website, where they have the Panther series of laptops that they aptly refer to as mobile servers. While the Panther actually looks like a laptop, what one would refer to as a wolf in sheeps' clothing of sorts, the Getac X500 mobile server actually looks like a mobile server. Of course, there are ways to get bigger, with some mobile server being simply regular servers with wheels attached to their chassis. The definition of the term server differs based on who you ask. The hardware folk would seek to characterize the physical aspects and performance. Software programmers would refer to a server as any computing device that can serve requests and that can be as simple as a mobile phone, which can be an Android device with an Apache-like web server. Even running an FTP service on an iPhone would mean that you can call the iPhone a server. Switching back to the definition of the hardware engineers, you would need to have some kind of high performance or increased redundancy to call it a server. With that definiting, two iPhones strapped together could count, couldn't it? Also, when you take an ancient 80x86 server from the nineties, you could hardly compare the performance of such a server to the modern day laptops and iPads of today. Our laptops and iPads would in most likelihood smoke the poor old server when it comes to performance and the reliability of our storage media exceeds that of the old servers too. An Alienware laptop with a RAID setup for the hard disk drives does make it qualify for a server-class system though its manufacturers and distributors refer to it as a gaming-class system because of its graphics capabilities and the fun factor associated with having lots of red, green, and blue LEDs flashing away.

Mobile computing today is essentially doing for the computing world what people had imagined doing with RVs. You could cook, watch television, sleep, and live your lifestyle while on the go. These days you can do many of those already - there are malls everywhere to get some food, there are hotels on every few streets and sometimes even several on a single street, you can watch YouTube videos from a cellular phone, and there's couch surfing to sleep in the comfort of a warm home if you are ever traveling in a place with lots of snow where it is too cold to sleep in a vehicle.

[Spyda 0]

I've never worked with Comcast, but I have worked with local service providers -- basically competitors of Comcast in a sense (even though Comcast has never been available in my area.)

 

What exactly is your job title? Are you in the customer service department? Are you a technician who actually installs cable for customers? The pros and cons really depend on your exact title. The customer service department is the "easiest" in the sense you do not have to have face-to-face contact with the customers. This is what I did for ~2 years. Basically answered questions, referred people to the billing department, tried to fix networking issues, ect. So, basic customer service work.

 

HOWEVER, I never talked too much to those technicians who went door-to-door and installed/fixed people's cable/internet. They were in an entirely different department, and almost never came in contact with me. I think I met one or two. They seemed to like their job. They basically were assigned new installations, and then the people they installed for would go onto their contact list. This means, those people would call THAT specific technician if an issue arisen. Even though they weren't supposed to, a lot of things guys got tips, snacks, food, from people they helped. So, I guess that's a pro. However, having to deal with networking issues seems like a pain. They were also on call 9-5 every single day, so they were constantly on the run. The area we provided service was HUGE -- so they were driving all over the county.

[k_nitin_r 8]

I would think the the customer service department is the least desired place within an organization. There are people who make the experience of being a customer service representative very unpleasant and not everybody treats them as just average human beings who follow their procedure manual to make a living and not because they get a kick out of sadistically torturing other human folk. Just yesterday, during my two hour long wait for a replacement of a defective unit within twenty four hours of purchase, I saw a lady of south east Asian origin returning a tablet because apparently when she establishes a video call over Skype, the camera image stops working about five minutes into the call. The customer service representative lacked any real technical skills and although he was right to refuse to support the product considering that the organization she was returning it to was just the reseller, he went on to claim that Skype is illegal software and that the company would not support any illegal activities being performed with its products. Another customer service representative spoke to her and she insisted that the product had to be returned so they did what they could for a product under warranty - they put it in a box, gave her an acknowledgement for the receipt of the product, and shipped off the product to the manufacturer. The expected outcome is that the product would be returned as-is because the manufacturer does not make Skype or provide Internet services to the customer so there is nothing that they can do about it because the product works as intended but software installed by the customer does not. There was another lady, of a descent that people would most likely associate with terrorism if I mentioned it, and she was yelling at the customer service representative for having to pay for a laptop screen that she broke. Next came a lady of either Indian or Pakistani origin (it is hard to tell because a lot of the people from one nation moved to the other when the national borders were drawn) and she insisted that a blender be replaced because she did not like the way it looked and that she did not get a good look at the product on display before buying it. The packaging was ripped open so it could not be sealed and sold again, except as a refurbished unit and the organization did not have any sales channels for selling refurbished units. Then came a man in his early thirties who seemed to be of African origin and he was yelling about why the customer service representative was attending to me when I he was waiting for a half hour - I did tell him that my wait was for two hours till that point but he insisted that because he was standing in a place where he was better 'positioned' to the customer service representative, he should be attended to before me. Apparently, he assumed that his wrinkled blazer and short military haircut commanded the respect of somebody of the stature of Mussolini and Hitler. My patient wait seemed to make him realise that his wait had only begun and that did only seem to irritate him some more. Finally, there was a couple that had brought their product in for repairs earlier and realised that the charger was missing when they picked it up - the customer service representative was probably worried about being hit by the man when he stated that the acknowledgement did not mention about a charger being handed to the warranty repairs department and the man yelled, "Are you calling me a liar? Are you calling me a liar?" Did I mention that the man had the physique of Mike Tyson?

 

I am pretty certain that customer service representatives are asked to claim that a product removed from its packaging cannot be accepted for returns, a defect is a feature of the product, and that the organization cannot deal with the kind of repairs that are needed in hopes that the customer would simply decide to back down. That did not seem to be the case and they would have been able to deal with the customers a lot quicker if they just treated customers fairly and accepted or rejected claims based on their validity.

[Deaziz 0]

K_NITIN_R, i hope you don't live in the US? cuz if u do that post seems very wrong.

[k_nitin_r 8]

No, I don't live in the US. The US customer service centers have a whole lot more training than the people manning these customer care helpdesks. There is, however, a huge blackhole involved when shipping products back to the manufacturer for defects in the US. Sometimes the products are gone forever! I wonder if such incidents can be claimed through insurance for something as little as a phone.