They have an unhealthy "the client is king" mode of operations. It is understandable sometimes because they're still a start up so you can't blame them for wanting to give their clients every incentive to stay but some project leads take it too far with unrealistic expectations, turn around times and pay. I remember the first time I got hired, my lead was this really mean man. New to the company and all of its systems but he would completely refuse to help any of us, telling you he doesn't have time to babysit when you have no idea what you are even meant to do. To make the situation worse, he used to massively and consistently under quote the value of the work we were meant to do while just as consistently overestimating the speed with which we could get it done. The whole team went through times where we would be assigned like 3 hrs of benchmark for 3 days for a task that would end up requiring an additional 3-5 days to complete and most of these was unpaid as you would be assigned an additional 2-3 hrs to complete the task but in truth, we had to pull in 8 or more hours to be anywhere close to completing. It was a nightmare.
I get the sense that management want to manifest an idea of an amazing working environment where hierarchy is not a limit for expression, land of milk and honey type of environment among other things but simply do not know and aren't aware that they do not know how to. It can get really annoying when management is in constant hustle mood asking everyone to work harder and push themselves further than they have already not knowing most of us have reached our elasticity limit, you do the most because you want to earn more but it's never enough.
Everyday, I dread the hour I have to log in, the mental anguish is unbearable but I keep on because there isn't really much of a choice. You have to eat. I don't know if there's a way to switch projects but there's also the danger of going somewhere else much worse than where you were.
