Pros
At first, everything and everyone seems nice, healthy, young and happy, I had a nice salary for my first full time job and a nice team to work with and interesting responsibilities. I met someone there and everything looked really promising.
Cons
However, after a few months, you realise that not everything is what it seemed. Projects are going nowhere because the management change opinion every other day, our team leader didn't want to manage us. This brought a lot of frustration in our little team (we were 4-5 young software/hardware developers). Even after bringing these issues to the management we were told to suck it up (basically). We tried to negotiate flexible hours and working from home policy but the owner wanted to keep an eye on us and has no trust in his employees. After a few months together with my girlfriend (which I met there, but we never disclosed our relationship at this point, we stayed discreet), we needed some papers for the purchase of a house. And went to HR to request these papers, which made us explain that we were indeed together. One week later, my girlfriend was told that her contract would not be renewed and that she had to "spread her wings to find a new challenge". That's when I decided to look for something else, I had enough. After some negotiations, they allowed her to stay a bit longer on the condition that she would still look for a job elsewhere and they stopped giving her interesting projects. When I gave my resignation, I received on a Friday night around midnight a very angry email on my personal mailbox from the CEO/owner telling me that, and I quote, "Your decision and the lack of consideration is very disappointing. It shows a shortcoming of ethics and loyalty." and he then proceeds to include this sentence about my girlfriend and coworker "Please have the decency to have [NAME] resigns on the same date as you are, so you can relieve us from her negativity and you deal with it yourselves." I made the right decision to leave the company. And nowadays, all of our team from back then is gone, also sick of this company's policy and culture. During my stay there and after talking with employees and past employees, I realized that they do their best to divide people and prevent people talking inside about the company. Everything is kept secret, some people are moles because they fear to lose their jobs. It's a toxic work environment and I don't recommend it to anyone.
