Go in willing to make a difference and do good work... Come home angry and exhausted. - Engineer Acuity Inc. Employee Review

* Management expects salaried people to work well beyond an 8 hour day on a regular basis, and simply accept it. This is not the picture painted for you when you interview with this company, and you ask about whether the company encourages and enables a good work-life balance. * Management also expects that salaried people "exhaust any means possible" to meet unreasonable (the codeword for this is "stretch goals") deadlines, and be available to do so at any time of the day or night. (So, if you have a hero complex, you have the chance to do well, if you do not burn out, or if you do not have a life outside of work that you value). * Management seems to do nothing about the consequences to their staff for a corporate paradigm of being willing to accept unreasonably short-turnaround requests from their agents. They do not over-size the team to accommodate these requests and do not recognize the impact / consequence to properly scheduled deliverables, or to the ability of their lowest level of management to be able to accomplish their daily work. They do not say "no" to these requests, or have an "express" or minimal-time-commitment deliverable option that is encouraged under these circumstances (apparently, this kind of thing once existed in days of yore)... and will chalk it up to the lowest levels on the totem pole as "not being able to manage their time", and they will call their willful ignorance of the situation: "Management". * For the inability of the team to "not manage their time well" (as per the manager indicated above), suggestions about providing training in soft skills such as time management or communications are completely poo-pooed as "they should know this already" * When you ask a manager for guidance on what they want, expect to end up having to make something up yourself. They may not have a clue about what they are asking you to do. * Although the company's senior management seems to have the idea that good ideas can come from anywhere (Kaizen approach, and the Acuity Business System), the hierarchy, and avenues of upward communication is rigidly enforced and very limited. (see also "in-crowd", below). * Although the company has been "willing" to evolve departments for higher performance, they have put people in management positions who have not been trained as managers, and are already well invested in the old way of doing things, like to be the "hero", and do not know what to do when taken out of the central execution role. As such, these people do not seem to understand, at all, what overloading a team will do in the long run. * If you are not one of the in-crowd, do not expect that your feedback will be accepted, even if it is completely sensible and logical. You will be ignored. You will not ever be invited to participate in a Kaizen. Your best thing to do in these situations is figure out who _is_ in the in-crowd and befriend them, and give them credit for your findings, as they may have a shot at making your situation better. You will know you are not in the in-crowd, because you spend no time socializing with the managers in their office, instead you will work _constantly_, all day long, and be stuck there after the people who do socialize and laugh with your manager leave and go home to their families. You will see the injustice of this, and it will very likely make you angry. * Although the management claims to be "data-driven", do not attempt to question the data-set requested by management, the granularity of it, or the value (you will be labelled a problem child or, feared as a threat to their position, if you actually think for yourself in these matters, or attempt to help. It is better to let them find out for themselves that this was a wasteful exercise that needs to be re-done). * Do not attempt to gather data without a mandate from a manager. Your data will not be recognized as useful, even if it is. * Management will "Try Different Things" to improve performance that are clearly not going to improve performance, and instead, will add useless tasks to the people on the team who are, by work volume, already the bottleneck. More senior managers will LOVE these "Things", and pat people on the head for doing them, and the people for which the "Things" are suppose to improve work for will ignore them as useless. These "things" will duplicate data that is already available, real-time, in a digital format. Senior managers will not see this as one of the 8-Wastes that the company and they themselves, in theory tries to reduce. The people who try to tell them this will be ignored or labelled as difficult. * The "Different things" management is willing to try may create a situation that borders on a Hostile Work Environment, but as there is no HR representation at your location, nobody has a shot at noticing that this is the case. * With all of this, annual goals and expectations for staff are not actually set by management, and you will have no clue how your performance will truly be managed... but, you are pretty certain that you will not be judged the same way as the people who are in the in-crowd, or otherwise have become trusted individuals to the people who make these kinds of decisions. * Performance feedback is arbitrary, inconsistent, and not clear. * I've actually caught a manager directly above me in a lie. This is a problem. * "Thank you" is very rarely heard. Ability & evolution seems to not measured by what you've achieved or learned, but by what gets missed.