I didn't work at Insider for long and left this company about a year ago, but I check in on this site every now and then just to enjoy the negative reviews which seem to get added regularly. So it’s been surprising to see a couple of new ones pop up in the past week which have been positively glowing, promising personal development, enthusiastic senior management and, most implausible of all, the promise of ‘fun’. The only realistic conclusions are that these reviews have been composed by deluded masochists or, probably more likely, they’ve been directed in some way by the management at the company to try to counterbalance the 1 star write-ups, because I honestly don’t think anyone who has worked at this company has had anything like these experiences.
There was very little in the way of personal development during my time there. Indeed, the best way for a more junior member of staff to make it into a more senior position seemed to be to just wait it out – eventually the someone higher up the ladder would get pummelled into submission and quit, meaning some plucky hopeful would be prised from obscurity to have a ‘promotion’ foisted on them.
It feels unkind to state that senior management is very poor but it is true. There’s little in the way of guidance and support, absolutely nothing in the way of HR, casual conversations are discouraged, mobile phones are banned, the dress code is needlessly stringent, the notice periods are lengthy and, overwhelmingly, the sense there was that all staff were institutionally under suspicion. It could be anything. You might find yourself being reprimanded by your manager for sitting in your chair ‘incorrectly’, you might get a verbal warning for overrunning your lunch break by a minute, you might be asked to explain how close you were to a late relative whose funeral you’ve requested to attend. But, to be fair, it’s hard for an employee to blame her line manager – the top-down climate of fear and anxiety is such that it changes normal people, making them behave in strange ways. Absolutely any decision of any substance is micromanaged, scrutinised and interfered with by the Managing Director whose belief in her own supreme corporate wisdom trumps both logic and basic decorum: she is blessed with monumental rudeness, painful vanity, a comprehensive lack of knowledge of the industry she works in and the capriciousness of a true despot. Seeing her talk to her employees as though they were naughty children was a daily occurrence, and hearing her yell at them was so common that everyone in the company seemed oddly blasé about it, myself included, which I didn’t like about myself. Should she ever make the decision to call it a day this could conceivably become a good place to work, because despite all I’ve said, there were some lovely people who were evidently good at their jobs but who were just trying to get through the day without being berated in front of their colleagues.
To cap it all, there is a powerful aura of cheapness to the place. The 1990s museum piece of an office, the perennially faulty heating and out of order toilets, the intermittent absence of Christmas dos, the complete lack of any benefits beyond those legally mandated, and, for an outfit which purports to be a digital media company, IT systems which are woefully antiquated.
So… sorry. Believe the negative reviews, not the fake ones.
