Pros
- There are some incredible people that work within the company. Make the effort to filter through the minefield to get to them. - Working arrangement flexibility (if you have the right manager and fight for your rights). - You will acquire professional, psychological and social survival skills that will set you up for life.
Cons
- Salary. - Derogatory pay rises and remuneration review cycles that provide no justification and invite no feedback. - Too many chasers, not enough doers. Chasing achieves nothing. These chasers have zero knowledge or experience to assist their victims to achieve the result required. - Shout loudest and throw your toys out of the pram and you will get what you want. - Expect to be bullied, humiliated, stressed and underappreciated (it comes with the territory I'm afraid). - Lack of understanding in the business around what each job profile is responsible for. Teflon glove approach is rife. For example, 20 emails stating "Is this for you? I think this is for you" is not an actionable request in English grammatical terms. Therefore, an action should not be expected, nor should the individual on the receiving end of the unnecessary e-mail daisy chain think to care about these musings. Business is business and process is process - stick to these very novel concepts. - Feedback for improvement is considered a form of attack and, in response, is met in equal (if not stronger) measure. - Employee survey results are masked to give false impression of staff morale (using global statistics to shy away from local problems). When issues are identified, there is no focus on how they will be resolved. - People and Culture are there to defend the company's position, not yours - remember that. - Once blacklisted for any action deemed to go against the dictatorship, kiss goodbye to your career aspirations. If you are lucky, you will get the odd crumb or two...and apparently be grateful for it. - People with a good moral compass eventually work out to go into self-preservation mode to avoid being abused and manipulated. - Teamwork is an overused word, which provides no understanding of who is contributing what to the end goal. As a result, middle and senior management do not actually know where the good employees lie within the business. - Training is lacklustre - the responsibility falls on the team members to take this on to their own detriment. Either they are blamed if the newcomer makes a mistake or, if you push back due to existing workload, you are told how good this is for your personal development and that at review time this push back could have an impact. Consistent professional "Sophie's Choice" mind games. - Most of the management layer are not actually capable of assisting or advising their direct reports in their daily activities. Some of my personal cringe-worthy favourite pieces of advice are "it is what it is - i.e. accept stupidity, don't challenge", "just do it - make it work i.e. I don't care, you're wasting my precious time" or the deflective "how would you deal with situation A - i.e. I don't know so figure it out yourself".