Pros
The pay is solid for Columbia. I got T-shirts and a hat.
Cons
Management is disconnected from their employees and work environment. CFO is married to head of HR which causes and has caused conflicts of interests when it came to direct complaints. When discussing work issues with other administrators they would negate feelings and positions of employees because administrators are friends and they won’t go against each other. Administration gives platitudes. An investor has become an "outside consultant". Man if that isn’t a conflict of interest I don’t know what is. The owner is a spread sheet guy. He has no human connection with the work unless he has numbers, spreadsheets and calculations of how things "should be going". Go get on the farm and work and the you will be able to see what it is day in and day out. Don’t spend one day on the farm, work for 45 minutes and post on social media that you did all this work and are getting your hand dirty. They are not doing anything groundbreaking. Hydroponic farming has been around for a long time. Repurposing shipping containers is nothing new. And they are not going to solve the hunger crisis with lettuce! Crappy lettuce at that. The construction side of the company is incredibly messy and over worked to where containers are filled with left over building materials, built poorly and needing constant repair. The software used is outdated and causes countless hourly issues. They still use JAVA! Get with the modern times and use a more updated system. I’m not a techy and I know NO ONE STILL USES JAVA! They ARE NOT sustainable. Recently, have heard on two occasions the company has had to throw out 8 pallets of products and then a second time of 1500lbs. This dumping, along with the amount of trash these facilities create and the water used is no where close to what sustainable is. And they are not making changes to correct this. So changing the way the world eats is just throwing it away?!?! They don’t recycle and have two very small compost bins that fill up in one day, then they go back to throwing stuff away. Their product is incredibly poor, over priced and not consistent. Since my time there we went from one beautiful head of lettuce to two, three or four heads of small, decaying and unacceptable product by company standards. Administration tells us to use poor, inferior product when they know it is not acceptable. Go look in the stores...their product is last to be bought, old, soggy, and way overpriced for what it is. Their company values are platitudes. Not followed by administration and fake. Catch words to get new hires in the door and make people believe they are this new Silicon Valley esque company changing the work environment. They are far from it. They have immature and inexperienced people in leadership positions that make daily mistakes that hinder the actual growth of the company. Along with useless positions that suck money out...what’s a talent specialist, manager of community engagement? These are jobs given to friends, so friends can make better money and not have to do the day to day grunt work. Their training is incredibly poor and does not provide what it’s is really like once you get to work. Too many people are in shock as the company withholds much needed truths about day to day work. Administration has said "we don’t know what we are doing, learning every day from our mistakes and making changes for our mistakes". Sounds like they are way over their head, growing faster than they have the ability, skill or means to and before the Columbia location is "fixed" they are going to go somewhere else and try to make another location before fixing the problems at the old ones. Seems like they are money hungry...not sustainable. Administration sits in their trailer offices and does not leave. They do not come and help like promised when people get hired. No one even goes to the event/parties they throw for the employees. I think that is a big sign of a company when your employees don’t show up to free parties. Their Christmas party was BYOB...come on!
