Pros
1. There are some great, hardworking people doing their best in very difficult circumstances. The camaraderie with colleagues was often the only positive aspect of day-to-day work. 2. You will quickly see how a company can develop a toxic culture and constant dysfunction, and you’ll learn a lot about which red flags to avoid in future roles.
Cons
1. In my experience, the senior leadership team, including the CEO, had an adversarial relationship with employees. I felt patronised while teams worked under intense pressure to keep projects afloat. 2. Hard work was rewarded with even harder work and very aggressive deadlines. Promotions and pay rises seemed to be based on politics rather than merit, and some of the best at navigating politics (in my view) performed poorly at their actual day to day jobs. 3. Leadership change direction frequently. Over one 12 month period I was moved between many different teams. Each move came with a new “urgent” objective which was later de-prioritised or replaced, making it hard to deliver anything with a long-term impact. 4. Work often felt like constant firefighting. Depending on your department, a typical day can be jumping from one urgent task or incident to the next, with very little time for proactive or strategic work. Some very senior (director-level) staff seemed unable to provide meaningful support in these situations and sometimes added last-minute demands that made things more difficult. 5. I observed a blame culture from senior leadership. Directors would sometimes assign large projects with unrealistic deadlines to much more junior staff. When deadlines were missed, the junior person typically took the blame. When deadlines were met, the usual outcome was being given an even larger project with an even tighter timeline rather than recognition or better resourcing. 6. During my time, there were multiple large waves of layoffs with little warning or transparency.