All that said, there’s a price you pay in exchange for this experience. And that’s your mental and physical well being. LinkSquares AE’s work 50/55 hours a week. They are encouraged to prospect on the weekends and listen to gong calls. When one AE gets covid or the stomach bug, the floor gets it too because they enable AE’s who work while sick. First meeting is at 8:15, but you get scoffed at for walking in at 8:05. The micromanagement goes crazy too. They have weekly/daily goals of “meetings booked” on the board, monitor your dials throughout the day, and treat you like a ramping BDR. They even keep track of what you do at lunch. I’ve seen management/top billers get reprimanded for getting a haircut or trying to workout during lunch. Holy toxic and unprofessional. How do LinkSquares AE’s cope with the stress and pressure of the job? Great question! The answer is doing coke/adderall/vape rips during the day (mostly in the handicap bathroom). These reps have eating disorders, excessive drinking problems, nicotine addictions, newly developed depression/anxiety. Frankly, they feel stuck and they feel gaslit. Oh, and 90% of the men on the floor (outside of the ones that got married this past fall) has gone through breakups with a long-term partner. Hm.... I wonder.. why? The office culture is misogynistic, hardo, toxic, and extreme. There are certain people in leadership who are power-hungry, patronizing, and manipulative. They get pleasure from publicly embarrassing and reprimanding AE’s on the floor. One of them used to go around on Thursdays and publicly humiliate you in front of the floor if you hadn't booked 3 meetings on the week. The office also has Big Brother energy. If there's even a whiff of you being unsatisfied with the job, you'll start getting pulled for 1:1's and getting "checked up on." You'll confide in your manager or your director about something personal, and then they'll spin the narrative and use that information against you later. The environment reeks of politics, favoritism, and manipulation. Also - the lack of diversity on the sales floor is sickening. When I was there, there were 70 reps on the floor and only 2 of them were minorities. Both of those people left btw (shocker!). There's some women on the floor, but the rest are Pillsbury Doughboys from Southie who all talk the same and think the same. Basically if you don't show up in an LL bean vest or a Patagonia sweater to the interview, you may not get the job. To my fellow reps reading this, LinkSquares is about to experience their own “Great Resignation" over the next few months. If you can’t maintain a good mental or physical well being while working there, that's not your fault. LinkSquares glorifies people who have an extremely unhealthy and somewhat obsessive relationship to work. Leave! Don’t sit there and be complicit when you see abusive / toxic behavior all day everyday. Don’t stand for it. You and all your colleagues deserve better, and deep down, you know it’s the truth. Frankly, the place is just a lawsuit waiting to happen. No one’s forcing you to work at a sweatshop where you get the AE clout with the grind of a BDR. You get a ping pong table, but you can’t have dinner with your s/o at night. You get beer during customer stories, but you don’t have time to do laundry. You do visualizations with a mindset coach so you can salivate over quota, but what you truly need is therapy. LinkSquares is a fun place to work, exhilarating too, but so is cocaine. Leave! Leave! Leave!
