Horrible place to work, stay far away - EDiscovery Analyst Merck Employee Review

- No pay past $22 - No room for growth - Horrible working environment - Horrible Higher Ups - You are not seen as a person Working as an eDiscovery Analyst for the year and a half I was there taught me just how cruel some people can be, how soul crushing some jobs can get, and how utterly MUNDANE your work can be before you have enough of it. Here's the cycle you'll most likely see if you take this position: Get hired -> Learn the tasks on the job from someone arbitrary from the team (There isn't a set-in-stone Trainer that helps out new hires) -> Work there for however long you wish (These contracts do not end, people have been working here in the same position for an upwards of half a decade or more) -> Get fired because they are simply sick of you/Resign because you are simply sick of the strain this position puts on you. The normal workflow is to put in an NVME drive into one of their computers, watch it get preserved for over an hour or more, count numbers of files and such, and then burn it onto a bluray disc which will take over an hour as well. For most of this time, you are forced to sit in your seat and watch the bars tick across the screen. They give you an upwards of five or six machines to do this all on. There is no bare minimum or maximum for how much you're supposed to produce doing this. They simply will tell you to do this and give you no further instructions. You learn everything from your more experienced coworkers who may not be qualified to give you the proper information necessary. Once you have learned this process, then you will learn it in reverse for the Quality Check portion of it. Then that's it. You might learn other things, if they deem you "worthy" of teaching you something new. But otherwise, this is all that you do for hours at a time. It is meaningless busywork that they attempt to convince you is actually important work. You can mess up on a part of the process and it will not be caught for years, because nobody will touch the work you personally did for years after it is finished in QC. This work does not matter, because if it did they would not treat their employees like human garbage. The leads, the Merck Managers, are some of the worst bosses I've had the displeasure of working with. Four in total, only one that actually attempts to interact with you and he will interact in the most disingenuous way possible. He will hold a conversation with you while you have your phone out, then later send you home for having your phone out during that conversation. The other two leads are heads of their own sections of eDiscovery, one section that overworks their employees and has them deal with paralegal. This lead will dump all of the responsibilities on one employee and will play favorites, letting someone else much worse laze around and do NOTHING all day. Then this lead will go around and complain about her employees not doing enough work, or complain about how people are constantly having conversations, or will fire people at random. She does not interact with the larger employee-base, she will simply watch like a hawk and point out someone she does not like and remove them. The other lead works with paralegal as well, though he is debatably the more "relaxed" of the leads. But that does not stop him from following you to the bathroom if he suspects something is "amiss". The final lead is the big head manger of the other three. He does not care at all about his employees and it shows. He will yell at ANY of his employees for any reason, he will insult his employees, he will disrespect his employees to the highest degree imaginable. And he does not attempt to hide it, either. He will yell at an employee in the middle of the entire room in front of EVERYONE to see and hear. He WANTS you to know he is untouchable. He is a walking HR violation and nobody will do anything about because he's the big boss, he's the one making the most money out of anyone on the team. You can work here for a long time, and you MIGHT be "promoted" to work with one of the other leads (without much of a pay raise, I might add, unless you're the favorite who gets paid $30 to sit around and do nothing all day). However, this is a blessing in disguise, as you will go from bare minimum easy work to getting swamped with work as you're micromanaged to an IMPOSSIBLE degree. Your lead will sit there and ask you how something is coming along and give you time frames way out of the scope for the project you're working on. A task will take thirty to forty minutes to complete, and the lead will TELL you, not ask, to do it in fifteen or ten. You could be learning something brand new, and their expectations are still to force you into doing it quicker, doing it better, doing it more efficient than even your coworkers have been doing it because you're new to the tasks at hand. They don't promote based on your work ethic either, no. They promote based on whether these leads personally LIKE you or not. You have to suck up to them and be their little teacher's pet in order to get anywhere, and even then you probably won't get anywhere at all. You'll still be stuck in the same position you were a year ago. They also hire diversity, which might seem like a good thing! Hire mentally disabled, handicapped, autistic, LGBTQ+ (the company itself is very prideful), what have you. But this is not the blessing you think it is. In fact, you are specifically targeted if you are seen as "different". If you're handicapped and you have trouble getting to work, they will not be lenient towards you at all. If you are autistic and have trouble understanding the material, or have trouble communicating to your coworkers, you will be harassed and will be expected to do MORE. If you're LGBT+ they will especially disrespect you, pretending they're accepting when they're actually not. Pile the work on the gay man, on the trans woman, on the nonbinary person, expect them to do a dollar's work for a penny of pay. Put the pressure on them to leave, put the pressure on them to be excluded out of this normal men's club for men only. They will not and they do not respect you. It is a trap for those who do not have any other options, and if you get stuck in this trap, then may God bless your soul. God forbid if anything happens to you on the job--the leads are especially incompetent in this front. They do not care about you, they care about their job security. They will send you to the hospital and make you pay for the bill on your own. They will punish you for the days you take off, they act like the Kings and Queens of a ruthless monarchy and punish YOU for what THEY did to YOU. Have fun sitting with that bill for a $60k hospital trip they forced you take. Have fun getting traumatized by the crushing toxicity they place on you. Have fun getting forced out of a job because they simply do not want you here. That's how they work and operate. That's what they do. That's the amount of care they provide towards you. Then later, they will not ask if you are "okay", they will ask if the equipment you endangered is okay. They will ask anything and everything about all the things that happened AROUND you, the replaceable objects that cost less than what you're paid per hour. They care more about themselves, about their role in all this, than the people that are under them. The team seems to stagnate around 30-40 people per time, with going as low as 20 during a drought of manpower. Though this means if one person takes all the work, then there will be none left for the other 29 people to do. They do not regulate this in a way that matters, especially since every time they tell someone to stop, the person continues on with it anyway. The same discussions are had every month, every week, every day, the same discussions that could done with a simple email to your working staff. Or a meeting Teams. All of their meetings are done in person, except for the big boss who always gets to work remote, and thus call in remote. You might go your entire tenor at this position without meeting the man who actually hired you in the first place. Work here if you have nothing else, if you do not care about the state of your mental health to make barely above minimum wage. Otherwise, you're entering into a trap of a workplace beyond imagining. Nobody can help you but yourself and the friends you make there who are trapped with you.