-Your time must be accounted for in fifteen minute increments, like billable hours at a law office, only the stakes here are much lower. A digital timecard helps you accomplish this feat. But beware, any project that is deemed to be in jeopardy will be locked by management. Some weeks you'll have to send 20 emails to 10 different people to get your job unlocked just so you can track your time, which you weren't really interested in doing in the first place. Oh, and don't try to skip it, because then they'll try to withhold your pay. Also, good luck hitting the times allowed. The times are realistically estimated at the start of the job, then the penny pinchers come in and slash everything to times so low that magicians couldn't even guarantee quality. It's a short-sighted money grab by the owners. Let's do two estimates and pocket the difference! Yeah, until the quality gets so bad that you lose all your clients.
-Workload mismanagement. Those responsible for contracting work are bad at it. There is either nothing to do and so entire departments are sent home, or they've bid for a dozen more jobs than could actually be accomplished in one span of time. If you raise any objection to a deadline, ultimately the responsibility remains with you and you just have to suffer through anyway.
-Mandatory overtime. In keeping with the point above, when the schedules are really in trouble, you will be made to stay, even illegally. Managers act nice and reasonable with jobs that need just a little extra help, but if something is really behind, prepare for the worst. You might hear something like, "We can't leave until this is finished." They won't fire you, but they will do everything short of that to make you feel pressured into staying, regardless of what may be happening in your own life.
-Training. This is a multi-faceted problem. GEX is a vendor for publishing companies like Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. These companies are not doing well and have been downsizing greatly over the past decade. Every project is essentially the worst game of telephone you've ever played in your life. Some greenhorn at Pearson sends your Project Manager a bunch of files. They maybe understand what they've sent, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they've never worked on this type of project before. So the GEX project manager will try to work with that person to kick off a job. You have one meeting, one conversation, and then every employee who was in the room is now expected to be an expert on the project and this meeting generally serves as the "training."
-This makes the work itself difficult. Ask too many questions and you are wasting time on the project and should get back to work and shut up about it. Get something wrong and be chastised for not asking questions. You'll sense a theme here, the "no win situation." That's what it feels like after a year. You will be kept off jobs forever and think, 'maybe i'm not approved to work on these projects' and then two months later, you're the team lead for the same type of project.
-Transparency. A few facts to show the company hasn't evolved since it's inception. There is NO HR department. There is no employee representation here. There is no clear procedure for reviews or requesting a raise. This process is left intentionally murky to make employees really fight for recognition. Longterm managers are just as demoralized after years of abuse, so forget taking an issue to your supervisor and expecting them to go to bat for you. Every battle has the same ending, the owners want it however they want it, we will do what is asked or we'll look for a new job.
-Nepotism runs rampant. The children of the family are given leadership positions that they're really not qualified for. One of the two is impossible to work with. But if you are on a project with her, everyone involved, management, team leads, project managers will understand that she doesn't know what she's talking about. The expectation is that you take the verbal abuse silently and don't bring it up again later. It's staggering and insulting.
-Rude managers. The production manager is the worst offender here. She talks to people as if she'll never have to see or work with them ever again. She seems to think it's the 1800s and the best way to manage is screaming and berating workers. She claims to be results-driven, but has a very short memory. If you screw up one thing, you are an idiot. Even if she's been happy with your performance leading up to that moment. This is a top-down problem though. The owners are just as quick to scream at a room full of managers, and this translates to more and more yelling. Longterm employees know that it's important to "CYA" when inevitably something blows up and everyone looks around for the nearest convenient target.
