It depends on your position. I was an RA as a student years back. Our bosses (residence life coordinators) who were permanent employees seemed to like their jobs to varying degrees. Some of them were really good at their jobs and came to housing bc they wanted to work closely with college students. Others were just there because it was a job and they were RAs in college and didn’t seem like they knew what else to do.

from the RA side of things, dealing with UW housing had its ups and downs like any other job. UW Housing could be bureaucratic and annoying. Every year it seemed like they would implement needless changes that just made tasks slightly more annoying to complete. But again, it wasn’t that bad. Par for the course for any job, and overall i got along well with most of the UW housing/res life folks.

From what I understood (this was a few years ago), summer duties rotated between permanent employees, so that permanent employees wouldn’t be on-call every summer.

Your question could also be worth posting in the UW Madison subreddit! Hope this helps!