- This is a typical ambitious startup that asks its employees to lay on hot coals for the company and if you can’t keep up, you’ll be discarded. I was working 16-20 hour days (happily) and still felt like I didn’t have enough time to complete the enormous list of things I needed to finish. You’ll also be working on weekends even if they tell you that you won’t. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for a team of this size and the CEO will expect you to do whatever is necessary.
- The CEO is a control freak and a micromanager who tends to have a very negative attitude, sometimes even bordering on hostility, and he expects his employees to deal with it or die on their swords. He leads with fear and makes the team constantly worried about their job security even as they pour their heart and souls into their positions for too little money. Worst of all, you will rarely (if ever) be thanked for going above and beyond. Staying until 11 PM to finish something that fell onto your plate at the last moment isn’t treated as a heroic sacrifice, but an expectation.
- Because the CEO is a micromanager and often changes his mind, you will constantly be questioned, sent back to the drawing board, and will need to focus on learning how to do things in a way that the CEO finds acceptable rather than just doing it well. In my particular case I was doing marketing, a field which the CEO had no expertise in, and yet my own expertise was constantly in question and I spent most of my time explaining things to the CEO and persuading him to let me move forward with initiatives instead of just going to work. Reporting to the company’s owner requires extreme patience and determination.
