Poor communication, weak processes, constant priority shifts, and too many decisions made by people who seemed disconnected from day-to-day reality. A lot of the problems were preventable, but documentation, standards, and accountability were nowhere near where they should have been. The employees who actually knew what they were doing were constantly expected to absorb the chaos and keep things from falling apart. It was a reactive environment, not a well-run one.
Work-life balance was basically nonexistent. Late nights and long weekends were treated as normal whenever a project needed to get pushed across the line, only to watch another team completely drop the ball while company priorities suddenly did a full 180. Then somehow your team still got blamed for the project not being finished.
The office itself felt miserable. It was about as well lit as a Walmart Supercenter, about as bland and bleak as a Walmart, and somehow seemed to have more cameras in the break room than an entire Walmart. It created an atmosphere where people felt watched even when they were just trying to take a break or grab a coffee. It was also loud, with employees packed into a cold, bright white concrete cube farm with no sunlight and no outside views. Even little things felt cheap. You had to bring your own cup for drinks because they did not want to give out company swag, but at the same time you learned pretty quickly not to leave anything sitting around because it might disappear before your next shift.
Upper leadership often seemed more interested in protecting a narrative than understanding the actual data. Analysts were expected to support the conclusion leadership wanted instead of reporting numbers as neutrally as they should have. That made some internal reporting feel unreliable and undermined confidence in how key business metrics were discussed.
Pay was another sore spot. Paychecks never seemed to match cleanly, even for salaried employees, and payroll always felt like it was skating as close to late as possible without technically being late.
One of the worst parts was watching genuinely strong employees get run into the ground. Some people lost weeks of PTO every year because they were too overloaded to actually use it, and nobody else on their team was capable of carrying the work. In more than a few departments, the dynamic felt like one person actually doing the job and holding all the real knowledge while the rest of the team just existed around them. At times it honestly felt like the core of the entire company was being held together by about five people.
