Pros
• You get your own cell phone and laptop, so you can disconnect on the weekends (they do push weekend work/praise employees who work after hours, though it’s not required) • The moments that I was liked at this company felt really good • You can make some decent money • Good health insurance, good PTO (sometimes I felt guilted for using PTO, but not all the time) • Some people in this company are sweet and hard working - this was nice to see because I felt like this company does back up a lot of abrasive hard-working people because they’re “getting the job done,” but these other people have modeled for me personally that you can be kind and get the job done too • If you do like a hybrid model, the office has a nice layout and nice corporate interior design
Cons
I was confused with how I was treated during this position. This was tough for me, as I wanted to get along well with senior leadership but found myself micromanaged most of the time. I felt I was constantly walking on eggshells around them and didn’t know which version of them I’d get each day. Feeling like I was good enough was sparse, even though I was either at or ahead of my financial goals much of the time. There would be times where I would be ahead of my financials, meeting my weekly metrics, and senior leadership would be checking on me and asking about my activity every day, sometimes twice a day. Once, when I confronted a director about how I felt I was being treated, they avoided accountability and basically just said that was their personality. • Gradually increased job demands (which made it harder for employees to succeed), blamed employees for not keeping up, and then put them on performance improvement plans if they were not able to keep up with the new changes • Felt that managers started doing mostly the critiquing side of managing; calling out what needed to be better all the time. There were multiple great accomplishments I made that I felt were not treated with the same energy as my relatively small mistakes were • There were some calls I had with different people in leadership where I felt micromanaged and reprimanded to the point of noticing my hands shaking after the call • Lack of diversity: the majority of this company is white employees - I’m white and the lack of diversity felt unnerving • Communication in the workplace often took on an infantilizing tone, where it seemed that management addressed employees as if they lacked understanding. Rather than engaging in the necessary work to foster a genuinely positive work environment, it appeared that they relied on superficial gestures like smiling and laughing to mask underlying issues • During an all hands call, our president said something along the lines of that she “misses when we were so busy that recruiters were screaming for help.” I got where she was going with this, but hearing this felt like my distress was something to be championed for, which left me feeling quite uneasy