tl;dr My experience was:
- Complete disorganization that caused me to uproot my life for the company's convenience, without proper compensation
- Punishing our team for failing to meet astronomically unreasonable expectations
- Higher-ups gossiping about their direct reports in front of other teams
- Shifting, unclear targets
- 16+ hour work days
- Little to no team cohesion and a culture of punishment instead of productive accountability
- Isolation of team members so we can't corroborate each other's experiences
- Poor planning leading to fighting fires instead of thinking strategically
- Lots of back-room deals and cliques, and if you're not one of the "mean girls," you're not going to have a fun time
---
I only stayed at this job for four months. When I was first hired, the company said I needed to move to a new jurisdiction to comply with their hiring laws. Fine, so I relocated from Colorado to Chicago.
During my first meeting at the company, I met other people who were living and working in Colorado. Turns out that I never had to uproot my life; the company "made a mistake." I made two cross-country moves in the span of six weeks.
They paid relocation costs of $6k after taxes. That didn't even cover the cost of the fee to terminate my lease, much less the cost of hotels + furniture + gas to drive for several days.
---
During the interview, I asked about the volume of work we'd anticipate: 40 proposals per year, with the potential to go up to 75-100.
Wrong. In the first four months, our team completed ~50 proposals. That's a 50 percent increase over the MAX ESTIMATED VOLUME. This was divided between two of us: a proposal writer and me, the department manager. To be clear: I'm describing the workload of a 4-6 person team at a mature organization.
Leadership invested in new technology for our team, which helped, but we also had to implement it while working at a breakneck pace. We implemented the software in 2.5 weeks when it usually takes 6 weeks.
"Concerns about quality" surfaced because of the workload, and we weren't given any additional training because the training did not exist.
There was constant tension between trying to get work done and trying to build the foundation for responsible RFP submission. We were building the ship while sailing it, which doesn't work for sophisticated responses.
Eventually, all writing tasks were taken away from our team in favor of giving the tasks to product marketers who have never written an RFP response.
The product marketing team asked me to provide them with a *one-pager* to help them learn how to do my job.
I put in my notice the next day.
I'm baffled at how this company ends up with so many "best places to work" accolades. I burned out in four months. I quit without another job lined up.
I'm literally going to work retail instead of doing this job.
