BE WARNED: if you accept a job as an Application Specialist here thinking it's a day job with normal (7-9am start and 4-6pm end), you might end being mistaken. Management hires separately for the night shift on support, but does not hire separately for second (swing) shift. So, upon being hired as an Application Specialist, there is a chance you will be put on an unusual shift requiring working until late at night and/or on weekends -- for an undetermined amount of time, often a year or more. Working on a swing shift does not come with a pay increase, though obviously it comes with a lot of added stress both personally and professionally.
Management overall is poor in the Support department. Within the department, it can be very confusing and frustrating to understand how to "move up." Management is very cagey and stubborn about title or pay increases. While there is an official set of expectations in terms of how to be promoted within the department, management tends to delay or insist you "aren't quite there yet." Employees accept harder, more complicated work without title or pay increases in the hopes (and sometimes, with assurances from management) that the title or pay increases will come in the future. Some end up working months or more than a year without seeing the promotion.
Support department management often had a hostile attitude towards employees that can create a toxic, tense, and needlessly stressful work environment. Some fellow coworkers of mine have described it as being similar to a "high school" environment in which employees are treated like misbehaving children. Almost everyone works incredibly hard, but the department seems to be perpetually understaffed, and this gap between work to be done and number of workers is not treated empathetically by management but rather as a fault of the workers.
It often felt like the Support department was stuck in a limbo state between being a call center (think Comcast) or a more typical support/application consulting department in a tech company. This can end up being quite frustrating as an employee -- especially in the earlier stages of working on Support, your job is very numbers-driven, and you will be strongly expected to handle a certain number of support cases per hour. Simultaneously, there is a strong expectation for Support employees to become more like "consultants" in terms of having in-depth knowledge of highly technical concepts and processes. As you might imagine, it is stressful to feel stretched by two seemingly opposing sides: I need to close X cases today but I also need to handle this very complicated and technical case that would truly require hours of research to grasp. Other parts of the company often felt at odds with support rather than on the same team, adding to the sense of pressure to do things both quickly and perfectly.
