Fred, thank you for the words of wisdom.

Adlai Stevenson said"He who slings mud loses ground"
|We X employees say "Live and let live" This means make money and pay your employees decently.

Here's my view. If you don't want to work someplace,

Learn all you

Personally, when I worked in the field, I had

Mister. T

lol

No Doubt!! Any company that treats there employees like crap deserves this post...

BTW- Does anyone know the going rate for a lead installer in NYC?

From what dave72 is saying the going pay rate is $5. Now I'm not sure if that is by the hour, day, or number of turns on the screw on the VC.

I would call around and ask for starting pay averages.

Dave

When you have been hiring people who want you to expend resources training them who then quit for 50 cents an hour more somewhere else you usually have to rethink just handing out a raise everytime it is demanded. People surely deserve fair wages but the payer and payee usually don't always agree. In this industry, in the tri-state area it is easy to change jobs to get more money but there are also additional compenstions to take into account. Most of the negative comments in this thread from their tone indicate negative complaining people who I wouldn't want to work beside anyway. If you fit into a company and and are productive you will get paid. If not leave. It is up to you to feed your family, not your boss. Most of the whining "victims" in this thread is from people who didn't work in the "place in question". If you are worth the money you think you are someone will pay you. Of course, whether you really are or not is the real question.

i don't work in this field at all, i work in the commercial industry and do extensive complicated jobs, my origional comment started out by saying that it would be a good idea to get a job in my industry first,,it is easier to learn signal flow and how to manage a job, and you will get payed more than if you work for some home theatre place.

i know guys that have tried going into the home theatre industry that have alot of experience doing thing alot more complicated than installing a television and 5 speakers.

and also the main reason why people get a job is to support themselves, you (shoe) must run a shop beacause you sound like one of those guys that just blows sunshine up someones ass and then when they get the job you screw the person,,not i said you sound like

the other problem is is that there are salesman selling systems and trying to make all the money they can and promise the customer everything,,they never calculate how much the cable and connectors cost,,,ohh i forgot you guys get all your cables with connectors on them already, they just sell the plasma's and tell the customer to call the installation dept,,when they talk to the customer the guy has a fit when he finds out the price

50 cents an hour for poor hard working people is a lot of money, it shouldn't be for a company.

more somewhere else you usually

Never mind raises, people will be happy if they will make decent hourly rates!!

People surely deserve fair wages

In this industry, in the tri-state area it is

Most of the negative comments in this

No body likes to be negative or complainting about things, if the employer treats them with respect and gives them fair hourly rates!!.

people who I wouldn't want to work beside anyway.

Did you ever think, it could the other way around!!.

If you fit into a company and and are productive

How many years of hard work and low pay would it take to fit into this company!!.

If not leave.
That's a typical answer with attitude of this company!!

It is up to you
|to feed your family, not your boss.

Now you really show compassion!! How would you expect to feed your family, pay the rent and the rest of the bills on a miserable pay.


Most of the

You're absolutely correct, someone else will pay you, not this company!!.

Of course,wheather you were a victim or will become one in the future is the real question.

I am not without compassion. I am saying that if a situation isn't what you want it to be, sometimes you have to accept it and move on. I've done it and I'm sure you have too Mister T. I'm only talking about attitudes and choices. I am sure that every company in the tristate area has employees that are satisfied and those that aren't. You only control yourself, any other control is an illusion. I encourage you to make positive choices and wish you luck.

Reflection is not on you "Shoe" it's mainly directed to companies that want to get rich overnight on employees expenses. These kind of companies should learn to choose their employees, train them and pay them well for what they deserve. I am sure not every employee is a perfect fit for certain jobs or situations, that's why it's so inportant to have the right kind of people and train them, give them decent pay and a chance to do well and make money for the company. That's the way it has to be to keep employees happy to their jobs. When a company does not pay their employees a fair pay, the company becomes like grand central station, people come and go on weekly basis, not only the company keeps getting all the flight by night kind of people, but jobs are not completed right and the company suffers and ultimately loosing customers. There is a lot of good companies in this businness in the tristate area, and it's not that easy to get a job with these companies, because they pay their emplyees well, and they stay and make a career there. I am working with one of these good companies now and I have nothing negative to say about this company and the way they treat their employees.
Mister. T

Harvey is a retail "boxhouse" that was forced into the custom installation business by it's customers. They are not a true custom systems outfit. The salesmen aren't interested in selling the client what they want or need for thier home. They are selling whatever is not moving fast enough from thier warehouse. Then they send the installer out to the site without even ever seeing the site and they are stuck explaining all the shortcommings of whatever they were sold in the showroom. This is a big problem in both the residential and commercial field. So called "sales-engineers" are selling systems they know nothing about. They think they know something because they attended a class or training(sales) seminar at CEDIA and that makes them a "Technology Specialist". These guys are ruining the industry because they don't communicate with anybody else in the company before they sell something they know nothing about. Installers are upset these days because they get thrown to the wolves everday and the salesmen make all the money. In my experience the best salesmen or engineers or programmers used to be the best techs first.

Funny how HARVEYS has three or four stores and the owners are multi-millionaries...

Sombody is doing somthing right...

Iv subed for a bunch of smaller outfits, when i was slow i didnt mind doing a pre wire or an install for 50 or 60 an hour. Sure its less than i would normally charge, but i got to learn some differnt gear on someone else clock. You guys should knock larger outfits looking for the help, someday you might be in that postion... and we'll see how DEEP your pockets go...

Just saying, not all large contactors are bad...

I pay my lead techs 25.00-30.00 per hour. These are not guys I recruited from the local appliance store either. They are professionals in every sense of the word. Quality is the MOST inportant aspect of my company.
A customer can get the retail store HACKS to setup their system because of a fancy showroom and a salesman with a good line of crap and a pair 700 dollar shoes. At the end, they get ripped off. They should do their research and they can get the small custom install company that takes great PRIDE in their installs.

Hi,
I am new to this forum but here are my observations on this topic.

The first company I worked for that branched into this field (from satellite sales/installation) pretty much did exactly what studiocats1 said, promise the world and dump it in the installers lap to make it happen. The salesman made all the money on the job and was not held responsible for anything that went wrong, which in most cases was because the system was not designed properly from the start. The installer made crap for a living on the job, was forced to use his own resources to make the job work and whenever he submitted an expense report (for things like adapters, plugs, drywall compound etc) the report was thoroughly checked over and it was established that nothing on the report was needed at the job to make it work and they would thereby not compensate the money that came out of my pocket to make the job work.

The second company I worked for offered me $16 hour and a company truck (which was always on order and never actually showed up along with the fuel card I was supposed to receive). Also they told me I would be the lead tech and get a raise in a couple of months depending on how things worked out. After I was hired four other techs were hired and all of them told the same thing. Naturally each of us were trying to be the more assertive on the job site and of course this created some pretty serious conflicts on the site (not very professional I assure you). I heard from several of the companies customers whose accounts I had taken over that they were upset by the number of technicians that had worked on their system. They could never maintain a relationship with a real installer that knew their system and how it worked. Among a dozen other problems that plagued the place (ex: the owner spent 3 of the 6 months I worked there on vacation and nobody could order any equipment while he was out of town).

The next company I worked for had relationships with several large scale spec builders (they built a lot of row houses rather than a few custom houses) and they offered a very unusual (to me) way of compensation, part hourly wage and part piece pay. They had a lot of business running through there and I immediately identified a dozen problems with the processes they were using that if fixed would make their jobs go more smoothly with less problems, take less time and produce better results. Number one they did not really have a system, number two they were not tracking their work in a managable database and the BIG number three there was no management positions in the company whatsoever. No project managers, not operations manager and no one kept track of inventory. (the warehouse was insane) As a result everything was a complete cluster****. Jobs would get missed, installers were getting charged back 5 and 6 times what they were getting paid per piece and were never allowed to correct their own mistakes (until I forced them to allow me to correct my own) Almost nobody was actually trained on how to do anything and as a result I found some of the work being done out there to be substandard to the extreme (a couple of the guys were really good I have to say) and this company did not follow through with one of the largest captive client bases I have ever seen, they did not sell hardly any product whatsoever! The salesmen had little to no clue what is available out there in the market and therefore did not sell anything but basic security systems and the occassional central vac (blech!)

The last company I worked for had several problems that finally led me to believe they were only accredited on paper and had little to no experience in the field and were charging outrageous prices for stuff they had no idea how to assemble. They offered me a pathetic pay scale (but the opportunity is terrific! donchano...) and asked me to get my LV license to allow them to do business in restricted areas (in the city it is required to have this license but in the suburbs it is not) and have since offered me nothing but critisim about my completion rate (which has been largely spent cleaning up their previous work, not a small task I might add) Misappropriation of funds, a job was collected on but the equipment was not ordered now that the time has come to install the equipment there is nothing available to install and a host of other problems too lengthy to get into.

So speaking from experience I can say there are a lot of crappy companies out there that are too greedy to do business the right way and pay their installers what they are actually worth. I love my job and the career I have chosen however I find that it is almost not worth it to continue in this business just because there are not any good companies out there to work for. Speaking for myself (though I think I might be speaking for a lot of installers out there) if I were being paid well and the jobs were actually being designed properly and ordered up without changes (other than what was ordered by the client) I would be very happy making a solid average wage. I also think that too many people are not willing to look past themselves to see that an installer might actually have a few good ideas that would make or save the company money and time.

It is a shame to me that this industry is getting so screwed up in its infancy by so many bad companies and bad installers like these and others.

Sorry so long and so many incomplete descriptions.

Chip