Pros
- the experience was eye-opening -I got health insurance which was nice
Cons
Never before have I been in such an open state of leadership abuse. The owner and operator of the company, Ike Newton, is incredibly hot and cold. He uses company resources to work on his own personal projects, forbade me from working with fellow coworkers to get them necessary documents, and generally held termination over my head as a threat for the entire term of my employment. To boot, he would often leave for days on end with explicit instructions to leave things on his desk the next morning, and then failing to even show up to collect them for the next week. More often than not, I would not hear feedback on these, ever. There was no training whatsoever for my position, to the point that even a year after my onboarding, I was discovering things that were required of me that no one had bothered to tell me. I was then reprimanded for not doing these things, despite not even knowing of their existence. Feedback is completely non-existent. I was never given any kind of performance review, or told explicitly what I should or should not improve. Additionally, there is blatant racism and bigotry rampant among the staff, along with an "us vs them" mentality among the long-term employees and the newer employees. These seem to go unnoticed and uncared for by management. I was openly bullied by a coworker, despite attempts on my end to be gracious and kind. During the pandemic, I was told that I was required to be onsite during lockdowns, despite not being in an essential business position, because "I had to be watched". Nothing I was doing at the time could not be completed from my home, as more often than not, I was not given any work what to do whatsoever. However, when there was work... Worklife balance was practically unheard of, as I would often get texts, emails, and calls after I had left for the day, often half an hour later than the official close time of the company. These would be things such as requests for new designs that had not been mentioned until this point, requests for files that no longer existed or were exceedingly difficult to find. Coworkers would announce an hour before close that they needed a number of printed documents (usually in excess of 100 copies) that they needed, despite my repeated requests that they put in any print requests the morning of so I could fight with the printer (which they refused to replace or properly repair). In addition, I was promised a payrise after my first year of employment. After a year, I did not receive this, yet I was getting good feedback. I never brought it up due to fear of retaliation. Seven months later, I was terminated for "not doing good enough work" which there was little to no indicator of my quality falling, I had worked exceptionally hard on several difficult edits in incredibly short time frames (often amounting to hours from request to send off). I was terrified of logging any overtime for fear of being reprimanded, despite working through all of my lunches, and often an extra half hour most week-nights. They lied explicitly about the position being salaried. I was told it would be a salaried position, only to be handed an hours sheet and being paid hourly wages.
