A Masterclass in Wage Theft, Nepotism, and Willful Incompetence - Help Desk Technician bei In-Telecom: Mitarbeiterbewertung

I am going to be precise, thorough, and entirely factual. Every claim I make below I am prepared to substantiate. I encourage anyone reading this to take notes. This company is breaking the law. The on-call rotation enforced on employees does not meet the legal requirements for compensated on-call time under federal and state wage and hour law. This is not a matter of interpretation. It is not a technicality. It is a straightforward violation that has been raised internally and deliberately ignored by people who have calculated that their employees cannot afford to fight back. They may be wrong about that. Current and former employees should contact the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, because what is being described in the breakroom in hushed tones is, in fact, actionable. Mandatory training and certifications required to perform this job are also not being properly compensated. If an employer requires a certification as a condition of your employment, that time belongs to them and they are legally obligated to pay for it. Full stop. The practice of passing those costs, in time or money, onto employees is wage theft with a professional development bow tied around it. The pay is insulting and the expectations are delusional. Compensation at this organization sits below industry standard by a margin that cannot be explained by market conditions, company size, or any other legitimate factor. The only explanation is that the people setting salaries either do not know what the market looks like or do not care. Neither option reflects well on them. What makes this genuinely enraging is the expectation layered on top of it. Extraordinary effort is not rewarded here. It is reclassified as normal and used to raise the bar for everyone. Employees who consistently go above and beyond are not recognized. They are simply exploited at a higher level than their peers, and the organization treats their output as evidence that its compensation model is working rather than evidence that its employees are being taken advantage of. Advancement is not earned here. It is inherited. If you are not already friends with the right people before you walk through the door, you will not be promoted. This is not cynicism. This is the observable, documented, repeating pattern of every promotion cycle at this company. Qualified, high-performing employees are passed over with no explanation while members of the inner circle advance on the basis of relationships rather than results. Leadership does not even attempt to disguise this anymore. They have simply stopped pretending that performance matters. Talented people are strung along for years with vague encouragement and non-committal feedback before they finally understand that the ceiling they keep hitting is not circumstantial. It is a feature, not a bug. Feedback here is a weapon, never a tool. Positive reinforcement does not exist at this company. Employees receive no acknowledgment of their successes, no recognition for their contributions, and no indication that their work is valued. The only feedback that flows consistently and reliably downward is negative. Errors are documented, publicized, and retained. Wins are absorbed into operations without comment. This is not an accident and it is not negligence. A workplace where employees only ever hear what they did wrong is a workplace that has been deliberately structured to keep people insecure, compliant, and too off-balance to advocate for themselves. Whether this is intentional or simply the byproduct of bad leadership is, at this point, an academic question. The effect on the workforce is the same either way. The owners react first and investigate never. Ownership at this company operates on a simple and destructive cycle: perceive a problem, assign blame immediately, act on that blame before a single fact has been confirmed, and then offer no correction or accountability when the facts eventually contradict the initial reaction. Employees are confronted, accused, and in some cases penalized based on nothing more than an owner’s emotional read of a situation. When the investigation that should have preceded the reaction finally happens and reveals a different story, there is no apology. There is no acknowledgment. There is certainly no accountability. There is only the expectation that everyone moves on, and a quiet, collective understanding that this will happen again. Calling this cowardice is not hyperbole. Leaders who are unwilling to verify facts before acting on their feelings are not making hard decisions. They are avoiding the discomfort of patience and making their employees absorb the cost. Leadership has no idea what they are doing and cannot be told otherwise. This is the point I want current job seekers to read most carefully. The leadership team at this organization does not have the relevant domain knowledge or professional background to competently manage the operations they are responsible for. This is not a personal attack. It is a professional assessment based on observable decisions made over a significant period of time. What makes this particularly difficult to work around is that the incompetence is insulated by confidence. Leadership does not know what it does not know, and it is not interested in finding out. Employees with deep expertise and years of relevant experience are routinely overruled by people who cannot engage with the substance of the disagreement. Raising concerns through proper channels results not in reconsideration but in resentment. The organization has created a culture where being right and being senior are treated as interchangeable, and everyone below a certain pay grade has learned to simply watch preventable mistakes happen. The company is being run by ChatGPT. I debated including this because it sounds absurd, and yet here we are. A material and genuinely alarming portion of this company’s communications, policies, and operational decisions are generated by AI and published without the kind of critical review that would require the people doing it to actually understand the subject matter. Memos, directives, and frameworks that affect real employees’ working conditions and livelihoods are being authored by a language model operated by people who lack the expertise to evaluate whether the output is accurate, appropriate, or legal. The result is a company that looks, from a distance, like a functioning professional organization. It has the vocabulary, the formatting, and the structure of something legitimate. What it does not have is the underlying knowledge and accountability that should produce those things. It is a costume, and the people wearing it are charging you for the privilege of helping them keep it on.