Don't work here if you value your career - Marketing Specialist 1E Employee Review

1E has the worst, most clueless management team I have ever met and a total absence of direction. Foremost among these incompetents is the CEO, a runaway ego well past his sell-by date who rages like a despotic toddler and spreads the seeds of failure over any half decent ideas that emerge. Joining 1E is not quite career suicide, but it’s hardly a good move. And frankly, the moment you put 1E on your LinkedIn profile, recruiters will start circling your head like greedy carrion because they KNOW. Really, unless your idea of a good career move is fantasising about your exit interview before you’ve even passed probation then MOVE ALONG. I know what you’re thinking. You are a seasoned professional who’s seen it all. A man or woman of substance. Surely it can’t be that bad? Yes. Yes, it can. Imagine you take a role in marketing. None of 1E's senior team really understands what marketing is about, neither do they care. In consequence, you will spend your (brief, brief) time there banging against a brick wall of ignorance. Unfortunately for you, they also have egos the size of Colossus, and fancy themselves thought leaders. So, you will be presented with ideas so preposterous only a donkey would consider them worthy of a marketing campaign – and be expected to turn them into industry-leading stuff. You will be asked to present three year-old “strategic” ideas as though they are the latest innovation. At one point during this madness you will come back from lunch to discover half the people on your team have mysteriously disappeared, possibly murdered by Orcs, and the HR team is pretending they never existed. The upside to all of this, of course, is that you develop fantastic relationships with the people around you. 1E has an uncanny knack of hiring tremendous people. Which is great because it means that when you are all huddling in those muddy trenches like Blackadder & Co., waiting for your turn to go over the top, you can have great conversations and forge deep friendships based on a shared experience of being belittled and undermined by morons on a daily basis. 1E is blind. Blind to the market around it and above all blind to its own faults and shortcomings. Try asking any of the senior team about how sustainable a business dependent on software licences is now that so many are moving to subscription models (they will blush and mumble nonsense). Try sitting through any meeting involving financial projections without erupting into scales of laughter. I dare you. 1E's HR team likes to post repetitive potted replies to posts like this one, featuring loaded comments about bitter/disgruntled/discarded/underperforming employees. However, if you cast your eye over the CV or LinkedIn profile of any ex-1E victim, you will be struck by how swiftly they move on to more senior roles at prestigious companies. I, for example, did such a bad job at 1E that I was handed a director-level role by my next employer.