Pros
- colleagues were highly skilled, professional, and collaborative
- opportunities to develop strong self-management and problem-solving skills due to minimal guidance
- exposure to cross-team collaboration in a large-scale environment
- access to certain training resources and internal documentation
-flexible remote work arrangement.
Cons
1. Severe Below-Market Salary
- my salary was drastically below industry standards - approximately 100% below the market rate for my role created a strong sense of being undervalued from the start
- when I inquired about how my raise was calculated, I received only value answers such as "there are many moving parts" or "management made titanic efforts"
- no clear explanation was given about what is required to achieve a meaningful raise
2. Invasive Micromanagement and Ignored Boundaries
- managers interfered in personal matters during 1:1s, including unsolicited advice about relocating to another city or country
- during wartime, I was pressured to relocate abroad, and personal details I shared were later used against me
- when I took officially allowed self care days, my manager demanded to know why and pressed for personal details, despite this not being required by company policy
- HR policies were not applied consistently. Even when time off was formally approved in workday by manager, I was later pressured to justify it again in chats and with colleagues. New, undocumented 'rules' were introduced retroactively, shifting responsibility for manager's poor planning onto employees
3. Career Stagnation and Unequal Opportunities
- I was deliberately kept on outdated technology stacks and repetitive migration work, while interesting skill-building tasks were given to others, including new trainees
- Promises to transition me to more engaging work after mentoring were never fully fulfilled
- the manager personally handled the hiring of trainees, yes I was assigned to mentor someone with no IT background, who was emotionally manipulative and avoided responsibility, without any managerial support to address the issues
- Even during migration work, I had to plan and manage my own tasks without support
4. Misuse of performance goals and responsibilities
- Some goals set for me were tied to work that primarily benefited the manager personally (preparing materials for QBR)
- I was given goals where the outcome depended heavily on the work of others, limiting my ability to achieve them independently
- pulled into solving issues and collecting project metrics for unrelated projects under the same manager
- project metrics gathering - which was never formally my responsibility - was pushed onto me repeatedly without role acknowledging or compensation
- these interruptions negatively impacted my main work
6. Task Reassignment and Favoritism
- "exposure" to interesting work often meant passively listening to calls without actual involvement, while my core workload stayed the same
7. Communication Failures and Exclusion
- Excluded from key meetings and chats tied to my role, leading to a four-week delay in resolving an issue due to miscommunication
- When transferring metrics responsibilities to my manager, I was suddenly held accountable for mythology decisions made before I was involved
8. Passive-Aggressive Feedback and Double Standards
- Feedback was always vague or "shadow feedback" without actionable details, yet still used agains me in evaluations
- Setting boundaries with colleagues led to passive-aggressive behavior from management
- If I missed a 1:1 I was criticized yet when another colleague skipped multiple 1:1s without warning, there were no consequences yet I was asked to have a recorded call with TLS after that
- I was asked to explain and justify decisions that were not within my scope, while others were not held to the same standards
- when I once made a production mistake, I immediately prepared RCA. Instead of engaging with that, manager criticized me for having 'too few planned changes'. In reality, most of his production work were just simple installs or configs and he never carried serous technical work. This double standard made feedback feel unfair and credibility questionable
9. Unrecognized Efforts During Departure
- during my notice period, I personally planned and executed the entire knowledge transfer process, ensuing a smooth handover of all responsibilities, yet this effort went completely unacknowledged by management
- even at the end of my tenure, my manager did not thank me for my work, despite doing so for a former colleague he had only worked with for a few months on the project (before the previous manager was assigned). This stark double standard left a lasting impression of bias and lack of basic professional courtesy.
