Editor's note: The author spent more than two years with one of the largest telecom infrastructure contractors in the country, working carrier modernization in Texas — Technician II, then Technician III, then foreman. He asked us to withhold his name and his employer's. Everything else is as he told it. These are one technician's experiences and opinions; we publish them because we hear versions of this story every week, from crews working for different logos.
I thought for a long time about whether to write this at all. Not because I have nothing to say — the opposite. When enough goes wrong for long enough, the hard part isn't remembering the episodes. The hard part is explaining to someone on the outside how it all adds up.
So let me start with what this is not. I'm not new to the trade, and I didn't wash out after one hot week. I was there over two years. I came in as a Tech II, made Tech III, and finished as a foreman — which means I saw the job from both ends: as the guy handed an assignment at 6 a.m., and as the guy building the crew, splitting the scope, dealing with supervisors, construction managers, the warehouse and the customer. The more responsibility I got, the better the view. That's the problem. The view.
And I'm not afraid of hard work. I understand tower work. I understand deadlines, travel, Texas heat, long days, and the fact that the field will never run like an office. Sometimes you stay late. Sometimes you drive three hours. That's the trade. My problem was never that the work was hard. My problem was how often the hard work came wrapped in organizational chaos, double standards, cheapness toward people, and enough corporate hypocrisy that some days all you could do was laugh.
Nine antennas to San Antonio
You join a company that size expecting a certain level of organization. This isn't a five-man shop. This is a national contractor — huge customers, modernization programs, millions of dollars of equipment, safety departments, corporate policies, all of it. Very serious on paper.
Then an ordinary morning happens. We're told: you're going to San Antonio, other crews on the modernization will need equipment — load nine more antennas, radios, mounts, cable, brackets, hardware, forty or fifty line items. So instead of grabbing our own gear and going to work, the crew spends the morning as movers. Find it, verify it, load it, strap it, re-stack the trailer. Hours of labor, then a few more hours of highway.
We arrive. And the guys in San Antonio say: "Why did you bring all this?"
We explain: we were told this morning to bring it.
"We called yesterday evening and said it's not needed anymore."
Wonderful. The information existed. Somebody called somebody. Somebody knew. The only people who didn't know were the ones physically carrying nine antennas into a trailer at dawn. That's the company in miniature: information always arrives — after the truck has left.
Same story, different shape: the paperwork says full tower upgrade. The crew preps for a full upgrade, loads for a full upgrade. On site: "plans changed" — today it's one antenna, a couple of radios, some small stuff. Fine. Done, closed out, gone. A week later: back to the same tower. To finish? No — to do another slice. Maybe a third trip after that. Every trip is the same fixed cost: truck, fuel, mobilization, paperwork, loading, safety setup, the climb, closeout. One project, organized as three. And then management asks: why so many hours on this site?
Because you built it that way. That's not a productivity problem. That's a planning problem wearing a technician's timesheet.
The warehouse deserves its own chapter. On paper the equipment exists. The inventory system says it's on the shelf. You show up — it isn't. Now four grown men are doing archaeology in a warehouse while the site, the customer and the deadline all stay exactly where they were. Eventually: "Oh, someone already took that." Then why does the system say otherwise, and why does the crew find out at 6 a.m. on mobilization day? And after all that, the same meeting, every time: "Overtime is too high."
Of course it's high. You manufacture it.
Gravity only works one way
Here is the pattern under all of it: accountability flows downhill. Every question falls on the field. Why were you late? Why so long on site? Why so many hours? Why did the truck sit? Why didn't you use the equipment?
Try asking the mirror questions uphill. Why were we sent with equipment another crew cancelled the night before? Why did the update not reach the field? Why was one upgrade split into three mobilizations? Why does inventory list gear that doesn't exist? Ask those, and the answers get soft and shapeless. "Miscommunication." "Plans changed." "Warehouse issue." "Things happen."
Things happen — a phrase that is somehow always available in one direction and never in the other. A tech twenty minutes late doesn't get to use it.
And overtime becomes a corporate fetish. There is a tower, a scope, drive time, loading, a safety meeting, rigging, a climb, installation, testing, closeout, Houston traffic. That's physical time. You cannot shorten it with a slide deck. You can add manpower, plan better, stage equipment properly, cut scope, fix logistics. But the corporate solution is one sentence: "Reduce overtime."
Wonderful. How? The technician doesn't have a button that makes a modernization physically happen faster. First the company loses an hour to a phantom inventory item, then an afternoon to cancelled freight, then a week to a re-mobilization — and then a man gets called in to explain his hours. The hours are the consequence. The chaos is the cause. They kept prosecuting the consequence.
The math above the chaos
While all this happens inside the fence, there's a second squeeze above it, and it explains more than any warehouse story.
The carriers push rates down onto the big contractors. The big contractors push the pressure down onto everyone under them. A friend of mine runs a small outfit — his own crews, his own construction manager, his own trucks, tooling, equipment. He priced in as a subcontractor and was quoted terms where the prime keeps 61 percent of the site price. Sixty-one. The people supplying the labor, the supervision and the iron would work for the remaining thirty-nine cents on the dollar.
Run a company on 39 percent of the ticket, and something has to give: the wage, the second man on the crew, the spare day in the schedule, the new sling that should have replaced the old one. Meanwhile the confusion — the cancelled freight, the sliced scopes, the phantom inventory — stretches every timeline, and a stretched timeline on squeezed money is how corners start whispering.
The people who actually build the network are working off the smallest slice of the money it generates. Keep that in mind through everything that follows, because the disrespect I'm going to describe isn't a personality flaw of one office. It's what the economics look like by the time they reach the dirt.
What hazing actually costs
Now the people. I watched how some of the old hands treated new hires, and there were days it was embarrassing to stand nearby. A man shows up on day one. He doesn't know your internal processes, your warehouse, your customer's configuration, your CM's closeout preferences. And it starts: "You don't know that?"
No. He doesn't. He's new. That is the literal meaning of the word.
If you're a Tech III and you know more than a Tech II, your strength isn't demonstrating that he's stupid. Your strength is making him a Tech III in a few months. If you're a foreman, your job isn't showing the crew who's boss — it's getting people to work safe, clean and fast.
And here's why the hazing isn't just ugly — it's expensive. The new guy asks a question and gets laughed at. Asks a second one, gets the condescending voice. The third question, he doesn't ask. Then he makes the mistake, and everybody wants to know: "Why didn't you ask?"
Because you taught him that asking costs more than guessing. If a company actually wants a safety culture, a man has to be able to say "I don't know," "show me," "I need help" — without paying for it in humiliation. Some people's egos are bigger than their interest in ever training anyone.
Friends of the CM
Then there's favoritism — what we called кумовство where I grew up. I won't claim every manager runs a friends-and-family plan. But I watched double standards blatant enough that denying the problem would be comedy.
A regular tech glances at his phone a couple of times during the day — water break, a minute here and there. He gets the talk. Maybe a call from the CM: phone away, we pay for working hours. Fine. A rule is a rule.
Recommended certification
Fall Protection Training
$30 · ~30 min online · certificate issued same day · valid 2 years
Also read: Get Certified on Your Phone: How Mobile Online Courses Fit the Tower Worker Schedule · AI-Powered Drone Tower Inspections: Threat or Opportunity for Certified Climbers
Working right next to him: a guy who happens to be friends with that same CM. On the phone for an hour. Two. Walking around mid-call. And? Nothing. No sudden concern for productivity.
After that, the speech about "one set of policies" is just insulting. If the phone is banned, ban it for everyone. If it's fine in moderation, it's fine for everyone. One man warned over minutes while the right man burns hours isn't a policy. It's favoritism — and it never looks like an official memo. It looks exactly like this: one gets the warning, the other gets invisibility; one explains five minutes, the other loses two hours; one gets the lecture on company values, the other simply is "one of ours."
Crews notice. They notice fast, and they notice everything: who came up with whom, who calls whom, who gets covered, who gets to be the convenient scapegoat. I can live with strict rules and a demanding supervisor. But the rules have to be the same weight for everyone — and if you're a CM who demands discipline, demand it from your friend first. That's where leadership is actually tested. Not on whoever is easiest to punish.
The Saturday that belongs to the company
On paper, it's a five-day week. Monday through Friday. A person might reasonably conclude the weekend is his.
In practice, "weekend work" can land at any moment, and then you learn a remarkable rule: to have the right to not work on your day off, you should have warned them in advance that you intended to use your day off. The schedule says five days — but unless you announced last week that you'd like to keep your own Saturday, the Saturday quietly converts into a near-mandatory shift.
Decline, and the moral pressure starts. "You're letting the team down." "Everybody else is coming." "Why can't you?" — delivered as if you broke the schedule, when the schedule, in writing, ended Friday.
Notice the shape of it. When plans change overnight, the field adapts. When the customer changes scope, the field adapts. When the warehouse loses equipment, when San Antonio calls too late, when a weekend suddenly becomes a workday — the field adapts. The one time an employee says "I already have plans," flexibility is abruptly out of stock.
If you need weekend availability, put it in the job offer, pay for it, and build a rotation people can predict. But don't sell a man a five-day week and then act like Saturday is company property by default.
Twenty-two dollars
I deliberately didn't start with money, because the problem is wider than money. But at some point you put the requirements and the compensation side by side, and it gets genuinely funny.
A Tech III is not a beginner. He's expected to work independently, know the equipment, know safety, handle expensive hardware, own quality, sometimes train others, solve problems on site, work heat and height and RF, travel, drive, start early, finish late. And the company was entirely comfortable calling $22 an hour a fair number for that.
Twenty-two. For a Tech III, in telecom, on towers. And then — this is the part that always amazed me — the same company runs a permanent drama about overtime. We will pay you as close to the floor as the market allows, and we would also appreciate it if you didn't accidentally earn too much of it. The workload, of course, stays where it is.
That's not just low pay. That's a broken ratio of responsibility to compensation, with a cost-control lecture on top.
Safety First, terms and conditions apply
The company loved safety — verbally. Meetings, forms, photos, signatures, PPE audits, slogans. All of it real, and all of it cheap.
Because Safety First costs nothing while the safe choice is free. The test comes when safety gets expensive: when stopping work kills the day's production, slides the deadline, moves the site, or means an awkward call to the customer. That's when you find out what's actually first.
Texas runs that test constantly — heat, lightning, wind, storms. On paper, safety is absolute. On a site with a schedule hanging over it, you can feel the other thing: the site needs to close, the customer is waiting, keep moving. My rule is simple: if a technician says a situation is unsafe, he stops the work and fears nothing — not the foreman, not the super, not the CM, not the customer. The moment there's even an informal sense of "if I stop this, there will be questions," Safety First has already become Safety Unless Production Suffers.
And the most cynical part arrives after an incident. Before: "we need to get this done." After: "why did the technician violate procedure?" Very convenient. While the result is needed, pressure flows down. When something happens, liability flows down the same pipe.
How good hands go quiet
Systems like this don't break people loudly. They grind.
A man arrives motivated. He wants to work, learn, ask, suggest. Then comes the warehouse chaos, the un-passed information, the double standards, the friend of the CM, the Saturday pressure, the overtime pressure, and a Tech III paycheck that says $22. He hears one more speech about "the team."
First he tries to fix things. Then he learns that inconvenient questions make you an inconvenient employee. Then he stops asking. Then he stops suggesting. Then he does exactly what he's told and nothing more. Then he opens Indeed.
And management schedules a meeting: "How can we improve retention?"
Start with respect. That's the whole answer. People want embarrassingly simple things: fair pay, predictable rules, the same discipline for everyone, weekends that exist, safety that holds when it's expensive, planning that doesn't burn their hours, the ability to ask a question without being humiliated, the ability to refuse unsafe work without pressure, and promotions that follow competence instead of friendship.
Here's the part that took me two years to see clearly: there was no single scandal. There were hundreds of small episodes, and every one of them, alone, has an explanation. Lost equipment — happens. The San Antonio call — miscommunication. The sliced scope — customer changed plans. The Saturday — business needs. The friend on the phone — maybe you don't know the whole story. The hazing — tough industry. Each excuse works once. When the "accidents" repeat for years, they are not accidents. They're the culture. Culture isn't the statement on the website. Culture is the pattern that repeats.
And the bitter part is that good people are inside that pattern — strong techs, real foremen, men who know tower work and take safety seriously. I watched the environment grind them down one by one: some turned cynical, some stopped arguing, some learned to play politics, some understood it's easier to befriend the right manager than to prove anything with work. Some just left. The company loses the professional, hires a new man at the bottom rate, the old hands treat him like an idiot, he makes mistakes, production dips, management complains about quality — and the wheel takes another turn.
One word
I don't want a corporate family. I have a family. I want an employer. A normal employer — one who pays a professional like a professional, respects a Tech II and a Tech III and a foreman, doesn't treat $22 as generosity, doesn't make overtime a moral crime while manufacturing the overtime himself, doesn't consider Saturday company property, applies the same rules to a technician and to the CM's friend, trains new people instead of feeding them to someone's ego, knows where its own equipment is, can deliver a message from San Antonio before the antennas are loaded rather than after, can run one tower upgrade as one project — and fixes the planning instead of billing the technician for the consequences of the planning.
Hard work was never the issue. I can work long, heavy, hot, and under pressure — as a tech and as a foreman. But there is an enormous difference between hard work and a bad system. Hard work makes a man tired. A bad system makes him indifferent. And once a professional goes indifferent, the company has already lost him — even if he still shows up every morning.
If you asked me for one word for those two years — not "pay," not "overtime," not "management," not even "favoritism" — I'd give you this one: disrespect. For people's time, their skill, their weekends, their newcomers, their common sense, and, some days, for the company's own written rules. Everything else grows out of that root. Chaos is acceptable when you don't value the field's time. The bottom rate is acceptable when you don't value the specialist. Favoritism is acceptable when you don't respect your own rulebook. Hazing is acceptable when you don't see the new guy as a future professional. And Safety First becomes a slogan the moment production matters more than the man.
No logo on a truck door is big enough to hide that from the people inside the system.
Welcome to the turf.
Why we publish stories like this: because the trade runs on people, and people with options are harder to disrespect. Skills, cards and credentials aren't just paper — they're leverage: the ability to say no, to ask for the real number, to walk when the system is what this one was. If you're in the field, keep building yours.