Toxic environment full of gossip and negativity. Many employees are afraid of some of the long-time employees. These long-time employees (many of them are managers) talked about their own employees behind their backs, which creates a toxic environment. In a public office environment (not behind closed doors), I heard at least 4 managers openly criticize and make fun of the employees they supervised. They would often talk about how awful their own employees were. One manager joked about how her employee was tired all the time. Another manager said she heard bad things about her own employee from his previous boss at another company. Another manager complained about how stupid and ineffective one of her employees was. These sorts of comments make the environment unhealthy.
The workload is high. It's not a good type of workload where you feel like you're producing lots of quality products...it's a stressful type of workload where you're constantly running up against deadlines and being asked your status on a project. Long hours are a necessity. You will naturally want to avoid having your manager and coworkers complain about you in public, so you put in more hours to create better products in the hopes of avoiding gossip. They won't tell you this up front but the environment is so critical that you will end up being pressured to work more in the hopes of avoiding public criticism. I often worked 10-12 hours days in order to try to produce quality products on their time table. I received the fewest vacation days I've ever had at a job. Poor work life balance. Compensation was really bad if you compute your hourly rate. The annual salary was decent if you worked 40 hours a week...but if you end up working 60 hours a week, suddenly the true value of your salary is way down.
Some coworkers were nice people and good to work with, but quite a few coworkers were not okay to work with. There was a competitive feeling in the environment, so I did not feel like I got the best help from my coworkers. At times, I wondered if my coworkers were intentionally being unhelpful so that they could watch me fail and have something to talk about later.
