Where to start:
- Management: Middle management are promoted based on their ability to do the job and to walk over people to advance their career rather than having people skills or the ability to manage people. There are few people to look up to as an employee and they themselves foster a very nasty and backstabbing atmosphere which is completely unprofessional for people in their position - managers will literally gossip about other people to you. Finally, it's difficult being managed by people who have only a few years' more life experience than you meaning you'll struggle to learn and develop.
- Work-life balance: Appalling. There is a complete disparity between what's expected on you based on your manager and tough luck if you've got a manager who expects you to be answering emails and setting up projects well into the night. Some strike it lucky with managers who are more on board with a work-life balance, but there's still the general expectation you'll be responding to emails way past your finish time. People will go into meetings hosted by the CEO and sit there on their laptops and mobile phones because of the ridiculous need to respond to client emails immediately.
- Clients: On the whole they're good to work with, but there is a minority who treat you like a second class citizen so you have to be prepared to work with some clients who barely want to interact with you. Middle management are always quick to judge your performance based on what a client does (despite it being completely out of your control to influence what another human being does) and will always side with the client over you.
- The job: Not to beat around the bush, you'll be sat there from 9am-6pm on LinkedIn the entire day, it's incredibly monotonous. There's barely any skill involved in this job, it's all focused around who can respond to their emails quickest and get in there before the competition does, which doesn't foster a healthy work environment in the slightest.
Finally, handled the COVID-19 situation in London appallingly and fired numerous people in the middle of the pandemic with very sketchy communications around the reasoning for this. Watch out, these people do not have your back.
