Avantages
Customink has an unrivaled benefits package. The facilities are very nice and well maintained. Every week the company provides a free lunch for everyone, and there are a myriad of little perks that the Team Development department organizes.
Inconvénients
The pay is not very good to begin with considering the specificity of the job position, and there are no time-based raises or cost of living adjustments. Upward mobility is not very good, and positions to which an order operations employee can aspire are becoming fewer and farther between. Becoming a "Lead" or an "AM" is not terribly difficult, but does not result in a significant change in compensation. The pay gained from the Lead promotion is the same as the differential from working a regular weekend shift. Advancement past AM is unlikely. Customink seems oriented toward cultivating a "dazzling" atmosphere and creating pod people, if anyone is familiar with management terminology. Through internal branding and small perks, the company is able to pay less across the board by creating employees with a rabid loyalty; employees who often have never held any other position. Company Surveys are taken fairly often for employees to leave feedback about Customink processes, but these surveys are NOT confidential, and you will be interrogated about every answer. If no successful argument can be made against your criticism, the idea will be "looked at" indefinitely. Pay for order ops employees is set up like a digital factory. Your base pay is barely enough to survive, and the performance based pay you recieve on top of that depends on two factors: "Productivity" - the quantity of orders you can complete daily, and "Quality of Work" - the number of "MODs" recorded on you. The MOD system is basically a big game of tattle. It is a requirement of your job that you "record feedback" whenever you see a mistake in an order, thereby slowing your own productivity and taking money from the pocket of a fellow employee. This of course breeds resentment and irritation in the workplace, which is swept under the rug like everything else. Order Ops employees are "offered" the "opportunity" to undergo interdepartmental training. While this generally is a good thing to understand the processes of neighboring departments, it leads to a very undesirable side-effect: Customink then assigns people on a day-to-day basis to do work in other departments according to where the bulk of orders are in the assembly line. In this way, they are able to keep a fluid workforce and hire fewer employees to do more work. This is most evident in the two annual "busy seasons". Customink will brag about the 25 days per year of vacation, which is indeed wonderful, except you can only take this vacation during "off-season". The result is that all 1000-ish employees clamor to use up their time off (since only 5 days roll over) which causes a backup in the assembly line. Then the company assigns MANDATORY overtime. Undoubtedly someone from upper management will be along shortly to provide counter-examples, and they might even be true. But if you are considering a position here, I would urge you to keep an open mind and look past the initial "WOW factor" of the free snacks and the million dollar patio. Keep an eye on the way you're being treated and the way others are being treated, and decide if that seems right to you.
