This won’t be everyone’s experience, but the biggest con for me was zero career progression despite frequent promises from management and supervisors of advancement. I felt strung along and underpaid for the work that I did, especially during a period in which I was easily doing the work of at least one full job level higher (if not two) for about eight months—and this especially egregious period ended six months before any concrete talk of promotion even really began. Despite supposedly having an advancement plan with actionable benchmarks that I definitely hit or exceeded, my promotion “slipped through the cracks” when it was scheduled to happen (after waiting for seven months), and after that, waiting again for another eight months with several start-stops in the approval process as the company underwent significant restructuring (aka layoffs). I did not feel valued and I also felt that I had been led astray to work in a niche that was built up to be “a big bet for the company” but ended up going nowhere and ultimately resulting in a layoff without even a title change, let alone a meaningful salary increase. Extremely disappointing and damaging to my career growth, despite very positive reviews from supervisors. It seems I was affected by a combination of unfortunate timing (company not being profitable) and well-meaning but ineffective management. A real pity, as I was hoping for so much more, and things started out promisingly enough. I was also told to simplify article structures and formatting that I had perfected, which led to our content not being as complete or helpful as it could have been; I was just about to embark on a revision process (to essentially do what I had wanted to do from the beginning) with my supervisor, but we were both laid off before we had any real chance to test or improve anything. Unfortunate.
