cad technician

Caltech Surveys

Company used to be a great place to work years ago when previous leadership actually valued their employees and team, bringing them up with them.
New leadership seemed good at first, but the reality is, too much power with one person. The "management" now are essentially yes men who care more about climbing corporate ladders and holding titles. Even the ones that do try to do better as leaders, have their wings clipped by the man at the top, if it doesn't fall in line with padding senior partners pocketbooks or the stroking the top leader's ego. 
It's truly sad, as Caltech was built by amazing people, but the current leadership would prefer to stand on the shoulders of the people who brought them to the dance, rather than bring them up together. 
Morale is terrible, culture of fear. Mentioned in a previous post, but minor errors are treated with such harsh responses from management, however management errors are swept under the rug. 
Especially recently with the careless release of wages and salary to the entire company, further proving the disparity of loyal underpaid employees to newer less experienced employees paid more. 
Constant fear of paycuts, layoffs, and decimation of morale. Employees understand slow times. But when layoffs and paycuts happen, then new blood is brought in while this is happening, and it is obvious that the company is trying to replace loyal employees with cheap replacements, it's demoralizing.
Truly sad to see what was once a great company has become

At Caltech, management lacks empathy, understanding, and basic people management skills. Management takes full credit for any success and quickly blame others for any problems. Employee’s scramble and compete for morsels of credit, consideration for a raise / promotion. A very strange corporate culture filters throughout the entire company.

Of note, on the problems mentioned above, there was a payroll data leak problem at Caltech in December 2021 that involved management distributing of a list of staff payroll to all staff! This is VERY troublesome for the following reasons:

1.	Privacy: Many people choose to keep the details of their compensation private.
2.	Morale: Staff in the same job and same qualifications are paid significantly different.
3.	Morale: Some staff, that seldom attend work are paid more than hardworking field and office staff that produce results daily.
4.	Data Security Concerns: The data breach has proven incompetence in collection and management of staff’s personal information 
5.	Caltech Policy: Caltech’s own operational policies are optional?



Field staff wages have been under downward pressure for several years. Wage and compensation reductions are normal and raise requests are denied, while the company spends on and promotes professional sport sponsorships. This year (2021), most of the field staff have left Caltech. There is a strangely high number of office staff that do not contribute in any way to surveying operations. The finance and administration department has constant staff turnover and has been in complete chaos for several years. Caltech was a decent place to work in the past, when one person did not hold most of the power.

The corporate image spin that Caltech publishes is silly. The lunchroom mini arcade is really, really neato, but the staff mentoring claims are not true. Ask anyone that has tried to develop their career at Caltech, specifically, how much time senior staff invested into any meaningful mentoring. Consider what is more substantial…. empty buzz words read from an approved social media script, or real behavior and actions that have repeatedly occurred over time. 


In my experience, the current management team is the reason that Caltech has a poor company culture and is a toxic workplace. 

The Management team:

1.	Overwork peoples
2.	Don’t recognize contributions or offer reward for good work.
3.	Fail to help develop people’s skills
4.	Don’t care about their employees.
5.	Don’t honor their commitments.
6.	Hire and promote the wrong people 
 
Everyone in the company reports to the President and are encouraged to report any "wrongdoings" by other staff. This contributes to the overwhelming fear portion of the corporate culture within Caltech and, sadly, offers an easy way for some staff to dole out revenge on other staff they don't like. 

There is constant turnover of employees at all levels, some positions have been hired and fired 8 times in the past 6 years. Some newly created positions are filled to great fanfare, only to be fired a few short weeks/months later.  Perhaps at some point you should look inwards at how this is working out for Caltech, and consider how this adversely affects the staff you hire, and the staff that remain.  

Caltech does not support staff in career development and do not care about staff or client satisfaction. 

Most of the top management at Caltech do not have any field experience in the Oil and Gas industry. Management will not admit that any lack of experience exists, and fear being challenged or scrutinized in any way when experienced field staff attempt to offer advice. This approach is counter productive to offering clients decent service, and in developing careers.

Caltech paints a rosy picture of happy and content employees and how teamwork is important. This picture is false. An example of this is that Field staff are out working every day in all types of tough weather conditions and harsh environments, only to be greeted by Caltech’s many social media posts that celebrate staff out golfing and playing fringe sports on workdays – not a great approach if you have any interest in staff motivation. 


At Caltech, I learned to keep to myself and not share any personal information with ANY co-workers due to all the back-stabbing. The workplace culture is based on gossip and the high turnover (explained below) is responsible for a very stressful work environment.  

Senior management often hire or promote an employee that will be put on a mission to save the day, fix mistakes created by current or recently departed staff, or replace an existing incompetent employee. Management quickly becomes disillusioned and hostile towards the new employee when they don't perform miracles. This vicious cycle gives management someone to blame for problems and conveniently deflects any criticism or critical examination of their own shortcomings. This cycle’s outcome is one of the reasons for the unusually high rate of staff turnover at Caltech.

On multiple occasions, on a typical day at Caltech, I observed unnecessarily harsh methods used to terminate staff:

1.	Isolate the target employee – cut them out of their normal roles, tasks, and decisions
2.	Recruit co-workers to do surveillance on the target employee – report this to the President 
3.	Spread gossip about the target employee
4.	Once undermined, dismissal of target employee, and dramatic announcement
5.	Blame problems on the dismissed employee

These methods were eventually used on me and like many others, I did not see it coming. It is my hope that Caltech staff and new applicants understand what can happen to them on the impulsive whims of one person. The hardest part of working at Caltech is seeing this happen and learning that it can happen to you. Be careful, and good luck.


Caltech will try to hire you for the minimum possible pay, work you to your breaking point and toss you away like worn-out socks if you break or ask questions. If things don’t work out for you at Caltech, they will attempt to sabotage future employment by bad-mouthing you to anyone that will listen. DO NOT use anyone there as a reference. Don’t be fooled by the fake polished corporate identity, jolly social media postings, staff appreciation platitudes and claims of teamwork / workers being “family”. 

If you are one of the hard workers worthy of being there, do a head count and figure out the percentage of staff that have been there longer than a few years. Assume you will be used up and cycled thru in a couple of years, the same as many others before you. 


Co-workers are great, people are here to help and move you in the right direction.  There are many great things about Caltech.  They include your family at company events and still engage in social activities to try and make the team more cohesive. But with any place it's not all sunshine and rainbows.  Management is too busy doing work and does not "manage" the company. Because of this people can feel unheard and decision making is slow.  Most of the key managers are also the most successful project managers and work is not delegated. This again creates issues with those managers not being able to manager their people.  Overall Caltech allows their staff the freedom and pace they want for their work/life balance and I would recommend them to any of my family and friends. 

Management preaches about how Caltech is a big family, which is shallow corporate image cookbook nonsense. The recent push to create this new image is bizarre, pick up any recent self help book on corporate image design - they are following it chapter by chapter. When you have to try this hard, you know there are problems.

Caltech does not care about employees, and everyone is expendable - everyone working there, past and present, knows what I am talking about.

Caltech is not transparent about changes - staff turnover at all levels is frequent.

Co-workers are pitted against each other by top management, in strange competitive scenarios with the most ruthless keeping their jobs.

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