The overall culture is much like the actual office: dark, dreary and gloomy. There is almost no interaction between employees on shifts. This is somewhat understandable given everyone has their own workload but sometimes it’s hard to get “hello” said back to you. The workload can be really high on some shifts and it’s common to have to work late to finish with no overtime pay. Sometimes other shifts will pitch in to help you but this isn’t always the case. The scheduling is chaotic. Shift work is common in this field but transitions to morning to evening shifts can be only a day, you go many months with only one weekend off and when you do get a weekend “off” you have to work until late Friday evening and return early Monday morning. Your schedule constantly changes without your approval so a day you have off a month in the future now becomes a work day. It’s common to also arrive in the office and find out you’re working a completely different shift.
The workload involves very little meteorology; there is an internal weather model that is used so you are just clicking buttons on a database. The only “weather forecasting” you really do is for tropical weather and thunderstorms.
The training system is deeply flawed. You are working a shadow shift with a different person everyday. If you are training on an evening shift you can’t use the training room so it’s hard to ask questions and even management tells you to just “learn through doing.” As the process happens, you come in the next day to a bunch of “errors” that other employees and management work tirelessly to try and find. So you will often get nailed for an “error” involving something you were never even trained on. It’s fine to alert an employee where they made a mistake but the process is flawed and it would be nice to have something positive to counter it. Speaking of that, feedback is rare, you really have no idea how you are performing until your annual review.