Pros
- The economic model that Intelisys is built on is profitable on its own, meaning the company will basically keep making an increasing amount of money as long as there is someone around to crunch numbers in the commissions platform and business communications technology keeps evolving. Everything else is just people convincing themselves that their ideas and projects are of critical importance despite having no statistical evidence to support that notion. It’s a handshake business. Happy sales relationships and a few decent solutions techs and accountants are all that is really needed here. Intelisys and its parent company, ScanSource, are therefore bloated with a ludicrous amount of middle managers who depend on their jobs seeming important without ever doing all that much. - And on that note: leadership and teams rotate through people so quickly that if you time it right and do the right networking, you can get promoted without much effort. I personally reported to 5 different people in 2.5 years, and we had four different VPs over marketing in the last 2 years - not a single one of them with any real marketing experience. (Read: if you belong to the in-group, which is primarily straight-presenting cisgendered white men, then you can succeed here simply by attrition. If you are a woman or minority, you might succeed through outlasting your colleagues and doing 3x as much work as your male peers, provided you do so while wearing a constant plastered smile and thanking the men around you for the opportunity at every turn.) - If you are a consummate underachiever, this is a great company to hide out in — especially now that it’s primarily a remote workforce. The guiding strategy for all teams is whatever the latest idea the male egos at the top thought of (rebrand the event while the registration campaign is underway and the signage is already printed because one of the boys said they actually didn’t like the brand that was developed 6 months earlier? Sure, why not! Rebrand all the events after music themes because the president really likes 80s rock? Go for it! You want to roll out a thoroughly documented strategy for mapping projects to big picture objectives and enabling teams to self-direct? Absolutely not!) So you can do a lot of work or just a little work and it won’t matter much either way; just wait for the next “emergency” to bury any evidence of your lack of progress on the last one. if you are a straight, white male and you are reading this — particularly if you have a Biblical name like Michael, John, Paul, or Mark — just go for it. Should be easy for you to get hired. You’ll probably even get offered a promotion within your first 6 months without having to deliver any real results (if I could attach an appendix with highly specific examples here, I would). - Drinking the company koolaid takes the edge off. If you join in on the “family” mentality and repeat the mantra about how great it is to be there (even though pay scales are well below median, raises are essentially non existent without promotions, gender gaps in promotions and opportunities are massive and the benefits packages are archaic), you may not even notice as your career stagnates and you wind up with nothing real to add to your resume and no idea what you’re doing with your time each day. - If you’re incredibly (or even moderately) technically competent in your role, chances are high that no one else will understand what you do or how you do it. So have fun, you can basically do whatever makes sense to you without any strategic oversight. Which is not to say you won’t receive an intolerable amount of negative feedback or be micromanaged - you definitely will. But the tasks you’re directed to focus on won’t make any particular sense and often times won’t even be possible. - All of that aside, there are many good people throughout the company, especially at the “lower levels”: people trying to make a difference for inclusivity and diversity, people just trying to do their jobs well, people who are lovely to work with. But you’re all in the trenches together being paid low wages to do largely inconsequential work for people who obviously couldn’t hack it as decent managers elsewhere. The best things I gained from my time there are relationships with close coworkers. In the end many of us helped each other build the skills and networks necessary to grow and move on (in spite of the work environment, and not because of it).
Cons
- People leave for greener pastures. A lot. And then you inherit their responsibilities. But you will neither be trained nor paid for that additional work. It’s expected because “we’re a family”. - There are no defined career paths. They hire young people or incompetent people and pay low wages. But they give you no support or on the job training, no path to wage increases, no trajectory for how you can work towards specific advancement or professional growth opportunities. They say in almost every company meeting that “there are numerous opportunities. The company is growing. It’s so profitable. If you want to grow, just talk to your manager.” Well, I did plenty of talking to my manager(s) and got mostly blank stares or being asked to wait just a little longer until "after [insert name of latest manufactured crisis here]". If any of those promises held water, they wouldn’t hemorrhage valuable employees at a breakneck pace. - Pay is below market, benefits are sub-par at best, diversity and inclusivity is abysmal. - Lots and lots of drinking. The path to being “in” is via the basic stereotypes: beer, golf, whiskey, car racing, and being an all-around bro. As one colleague of mine put it, “I’m glad I had this experience early in my career, because now I know places like this actually exist.”
