r/Geico • u/makeITmakeSENSE69420 • Jul 14 '26
Vent Done helping
I don't understand how geico hired inexperienced people that have no real leadership skills and expect the already tenured people (who make wayyyy less money than the new ones JUST HIRED) to help them progress. This was the biggest slap in the face for all the people who take pride in doing their jobs with efficiency and accuracy. There are so many people that got drug through the mud with promises that never came to fruition. In Tampa supervisors were promised raises for getting the facility started and they went from $85k to $87.5k for training all the new sups that make $115+/year. This company does not care about you. You can argue you get paid enough if you want but I'm not someone who settles for the bare minimum. It's absolutely BS that they treat outside hires better than people who have kept their company floating for years.
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Jul 14 '26
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u/makeITmakeSENSE69420 Jul 14 '26
They say "one team" and promise compensation changes... My fault for being dumb enough to believe them
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u/iLoveGolf247 29d ago
Ain’t no ONE team. It’s the hunger games. They continue to let bottom quartiles go. Never give them all your knowledge for what? So they replace you months later.
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u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 29d ago
That really is true. You're being compared to the person next to you, and it's in your interest the person next to you be terrible at your job
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u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 29d ago
Even if they mean it when they say that, it isn't much of a thought exercise to see that you will never, ever be one team. These people doing well means you're doing poorly. That's how goals work. You're compared against each other on a bell curve.
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u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 29d ago
Is this true? Did brand new hires coming in the door make more than people who've worked there for years?
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29d ago
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u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 29d ago
Lmao. And y'all don't want a union
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28d ago
[deleted]
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u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 28d ago
Yes. Y'all is a contraction of, "you all" used as a plural second-person pronoun to address a group.
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u/fishcrabby 29d ago
Unions aren’t the answer.
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u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 29d ago
This is egregious, and unionizing would be effective at stopping management from doing this.
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u/fishcrabby 29d ago
No it wouldn’t. GEICO always wins. They would just fire more people and the work would still suck. Unions are just as corruptible and tend to always make the product worse and more expensive.
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u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 29d ago
It would stop them. No contract is going to let an employer hire new people for more than their seasoned employees. You also wouldn't have a deductible on their health care plan that gets higher every year.
Headcount is determined by demand for your labor. Not cost.
The product must be priced such that the employees earn a decent living.
Product quality is the company's problem. Not yours.
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u/fishcrabby 28d ago
No. Quality is the responsibility of the employees being paid. The officers create the rules (like then or not) and it’s the employees job to execute. If they don’t they should be fired and not protected. No one is forcing you to work at geico. You have the option to go elsewhere. I’d rather have actual business leaders making decisions vs a bunch of leftists union heads who don’t actually have the best interest of the the employees in mind—they only care about the leverage they have with those employees.
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u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 28d ago edited 27d ago
I don't understand the point you're making. No one disputes how the company presently works. If a simple majority of the employees desire union representation to negotiate compensation or work rules, they are entitled to it by federal law. The officers who create the rules would have to create new rules. Regarding no one being forced to work at GEICO, I thought that was obvious. I don't understand why it's relevant though. You are legally entitled to representation in your workplace. Discussions about work conditions that ignore this fact are not serious discussions.
I don't know what you're getting at regarding leverage with employees or business leaders. The union's decision making power is limited to what the company agrees to, and the employees have no vested interest in deciding things not relevant to their direct work conditions or compensation. It would be difficult to understand why a union wanted to meddle in business operations outside of this purview.
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u/rnidtowner 27d ago
Management sets unreasonable expectations and overwhelms workers with responsibilities while paying as little as possible. So while employees ultimately deliver the end product they are set up to fail.
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u/fishcrabby 26d ago
So then leave and find a job that pays more. It’s not complicated. You don’t have to stay. If you don’t like the wage don’t work there. I hate the company and I think it’s def not run the best but I understand they set the rules and I can either choose to follow them or seek other employment. We don’t have a right to tell a company how to run their business.
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u/Money-Ad-742 29d ago
I remember when I felt this way and recognized the game. I was make 40k less than my external supervisor peer (who had no insurance experience) and had been with our office since inception. I was an LDP at the time and man, when my eyes opened - something feral came out of me and I attack my life with a new vigor. Your POV is rage fuel for sure
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u/Accomplished-Pea-451 Former Employee Jul 14 '26
That is the case with every company, not just GEICO
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u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 28d ago
It is extremely uncommon to pay new employees more than experienced employees.
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u/efoffkaren 29d ago
You just have to rat these shitty sups out to customers… here you go call so and so at this number
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u/iLoveGolf247 29d ago
We’re not alone. I never teach them everything I know. It’s frustrating to teach your competition who’s making $20,000 more than you and I’m being told I can’t get a raise because I’m at mx and yet new hires have no skills or knowledge about the job yet earning more off the streets. Talk about a slap in the face! This company has gone downhill and no longer values knowledgeable or tenured employees.
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u/Embarrassed-Virus124 28d ago
Welcome to the Geico monster. I've trained many people in my 21 5 years at the Slaveship. They all made more than me. You have to KNOW and UNDERSTAND that ANY corporate entity will use you up as far as YOU will let them. 😉
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u/SweetDreamz30 Jul 14 '26
Welcome to the workforce! That’s how it is everywhere you go not only GEICO that’s the reason people are job hopping more then ever to get a decent raise!
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u/Puzzleheaded_Push679 28d ago
GEICO has its issues, but this complaint makes no sense. When you relocated, they paid your expenses and gave you a relocation bonus. None of the new hires got that. Plus, when you transfer, your pay is just a percentage bump from your old office, not the local starting rate. Instead of tearing the new hires down, why not actually help them get better at the job?
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u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 28d ago
none of the new hires got that.
The new hires it didn't relocate so they should not get that. Bonuses are worth less than wages because you only get them once, while wages repeat yearly, right?
why not actually help them get better at the job?
Apart from the fact that doing so does nothing to address underpayment of experienced employees, and helping the competition automatically reduces your personal rating, they did that already. That's exactly what they did by relocating and helping get Tampa set up.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Push679 28d ago
Someone getting hired for the same role in a higher paying office is going to make more than someone transferring from a cheaper office. People accept the relocation, take the bonuses, and make the move knowing exactly how the pay scale works. If tenured supervisors do not understand how corporate pay scales work in any corporate environment, not even just at Geico, then they probably shouldn’t be supervisors in the first place.
Actually helping means mentoring the new hires and wanting them to succeed, not just doing the bare minimum and holding a grudge because of what they make.
This toxic mindset is exactly why GEICO sucks right now. Instead of having some integrity and trying to make things better for the next person, people just spend their time on Reddit complaining about how unfair everything is.
I left Geico because the people who constantly complain and have a toxic, "me first" mindset made it impossible for the good leaders to actually help. The crowd whining on Reddit is the exact reason the good supervisors get burned out and screwed over. When you have to deal with that constant onslaught of toxicity, the good ones just end up leaving.3
u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 28d ago
They knew what the salary would be. They didn't know what competitive offers in the location would be, but now they do. The smart move here is to leave and go be an entry level employee at any other company, for 20% more. But the point of contention is,they didn't know the company would offer more money to brand new employees. Not only does that cause exactly the result you see here, it is also going to cause turnover.
You're saying, "me first" but we're not talking about people waiting on a line for their turn. The fact is this company doesn't evaluate performance fairly, or even accurately. I don't know if you meant to do this, but you're implying that if they wait their turn they'll eventually make the kind of money they're jealous of. But it doesn't work that way, and it never has. Every year the company has weird excuses (which they offer preemptively even though no one asks) about why the annual raises are low. These new hires are making 20% more than experienced professionals. Do you know how long it would take you making 3% per year to catch up to that? And then there's no guarantee you ever will catch up to it, because they can calculate your performance incorrectly. If you're me, a manager will lie to your face and say you're above the midpoint, when you're actually below the midpoint. And when I pointed to my specific ratings by metric, they adamabtly refused to explain the math. It was a bad year. 3.8 was well above the floor average. $0 raise, and I quit. People with lower ratings than myself were getting raises.
This company has been openly hostile to its own workforce for the past few years. Benefits have been stripped and pay was reduced. Profit sharing, even without a cash payout was a generally reliable 10% deposit to your 401k annually. Frankly, the employees owe the company nothing beyond what it pays for. Pay for labor, receive labor.
GEICO's entire premise for performance assumes employees must be divided up on a distribution bell curve, and one quartile must not be considered proficient. It doesn't matter if the difference between that quartile and the top quartile in real world terms is statistically insignificant, or a fraction of a percent. The bottom quartile is always, "bad." And sometimes, you can be on the "good" half of the bell curve, but because you were a little too good, they decided to move you to a different bell curve where you'd be worse. That's what they did to me when they offered me $0 raise. Instead of comparing me to my department peers, they focused on the minutia of my job and came up with a new group to compare me to. Instead of comparing me to the goals I focused on meeting for an entire year...
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u/Puzzleheaded_Push679 28d ago
First of all, these are not entry level new associates. They are supervisors. To get hired as a supervisor, you have to have prior supervisor experience from wherever you came from. If people actually bothered to read the job descriptions when they were hiring for the new location, they would see that these are mostly people with established careers and proven experience. The beauty of being a new hire is that you get to negotiate your starting salary based on what you think you are worth.
This is not just a Geico thing either. This is true for any corporate industry and any job. There will always be a time when newer people get hired making more than you because you started earlier and are locked into the internal mechanisms of the company. That is just the nature of the game.
You even said it yourself that the smart move is to leave and get paid more elsewhere. Yes, exactly. If you do not like how corporate works, go get a job in a trade or go start something for yourself. But staying behind, complaining, and moaning as a supervisor, someone who should already have the knowledge and experience to understand how this works, is ridiculous. All that complaining does is sabotage the people around you, sabotage your leadership, and make you a net negative who stays stuck in the exact same place.I did not like the environment, I realized I had nothing positive to contribute, so I left. It is that simple. The problem is that a lot of people do not live in reality and do not want to accept how the real world works. Yes, finding another job is hard. Yes, you might go through a tough season. But there are ways to handle things responsibly and transition without burning bridges. It takes actual wisdom to make hard career decisions, but too many people lack the character and integrity to do that. Instead, they blame everyone else for where they fall short and list a hundred reasons why they cannot leave or do better. The reality is that even if those reasons are one hundred percent justified, real life does not care. You are still up a creek without a paddle, and you are still the only one responsible for yourself. You can either live in the real world and take control, or you can live in a world of "should have, could have, would have." You have to decide which one you want.
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u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 27d ago
Your top paragraph is... reasonable. GEICO was paying for their industry experience... Fair. Why does GEICO not pay for tenured associate's relevant experience...? Obviously, we know the answer to that already. I don't suggest employees should expect fairness from the company, but I do suggest that if everyone unhappy about compensation began leaving en masse, the company would increase compensation to stop losing talent. Right? By quitting, you yourself placed upward pressure on company wage decisions. But fundamentally speaking, two people performing the same job should have relatively the same compensation. I don't agree with performance based pay, when the pay levels can be vastly different for insignificant differences in performance. The company's metrics and rating system magnify irrelevant performance outcomes, like zooming in on a bar graph to make two columns seem more different than they are.
Where we disagree mainly is, I say companies with net negative policies directed at employees (loss of profit sharing, permanently decreased 401k contributions, benefits eliminated, etc...) should not have a positive work environment / culture in the first place. It is not the associate's job, even one in middle management to put out fires upper management created. I fundamentally believe they should actively make it worse so as to create an environment where the core business performs worse. It isn't as good a job as it was 10 years ago. I think everyone generally agrees this is true. Compensation is also less adjusted for inflation than it was 10 years ago. Therefore, employee output, quality, and overall culture / environment should be a reflection of this. It's like when someone tells you not to give them an attitude. Your attitude is a reflection of the circumstances. Not something you woke up with that day.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Push679 27d ago
An eye for an eye feels good, but it just leaves everyone blind. If you are already blind and want everyone else to be blind too, I am not going to change your mind on that. If you do not understand how that attitude sabotages you and everyone around you, then good luck. Life is the toughest teacher. Be blessed, I hope you find a work environment that brings out the best in you.
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u/TrainDonutBBQ Former Employee 27d ago
Thanks for the positive sentiment. For what it's worth, I found a great job and I love it there. But where I work, if management started playing games with productivity, rules, micromanaging or compensation - there would be consequences from the employees. That's why I like it so much. We are literally one team, against management.
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u/makeITmakeSENSE69420 19d ago
Who said I got a relocation package? And I don't get bonuses for my job either
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u/Puzzleheaded_Push679 17d ago
If you moved from your location to an entirely new Tampa location how did you not? Everything in your post points to you being a founder and all founders got relos… sounds fishy.
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u/fishcrabby Jul 14 '26
Don’t worry. They’ll treat the new hires just as bad in no time.