I accepted Clayco's offer right after college. During my less than a year of experience, I have suffered bullying, harassment and public humiliation at Clayco.
I know three languages, have academic excellence, graduated from a very prominent university with Masters degree, and I was the president of my student club for many years. But I was accused of being not capable, the manager asked me if I know math at all, and publicly asked me questions on the whiteboard, he looked at my computer screen to see if I was working. He was constantly reading my personal notes and gets angry with me for writing the notes in another language because he does not understand. He constantly yelled and humiliated.
It was my first job after college, they put me in one of the biggest jobs they had and expected me to check all the boxes as a Project engineer. There was no mentorship nor any guidance. After two months have passed, the toxic manager asked me to lead the Elevator Coordination Meeting, which involves many jargons and require some degree of technical knowledge prior leading the lead meeting of engineers and consultants... Despite all this hardship, I was able to take notes, and successfully concluded the meeting with clear goals and deadlines. I distribute the meeting minutes to the PM right after the meeting. Instead of a good job, I was asked why the meeting took 45 minutes and apparently I have wasted my time. This type of incident occurred multiple times during my employment.
During the OAC meeting, I was told "Shut Up" in front of the owners rep, designers, and other stakeholders.... Despite all my efforts asking the senior management for help and have me move to another project because of this toxic person, they only focused to be on schedule, and couldn't effort to lose the PM during the early construction stage... Finally they assigned APM to the project, and guess what, I was again told to Shut Up and got yelled at many times... I seriously thought it was just one guy that had mental problems, apparently Clayco hires many individuals with this condition just because they know construction. I was told construction is not a field for me and I should change my profession....
At the end, I had to quit... It took me 2 months to get over this, but gladly, I had two other offers from top 50 ENR firms.
Now that I'm looking back at this tragic experience, I appreciate all the things I have learned dealing with bullies, and still maintaining positive attitude.
I am currently a Project Manager, managing $200M+ projects, and I am more capable than that toxic PM has ever been. I do not recommend this company if the management is still the same, at the end, all that matters is the team and management you deal with that defines the company for you.
