High expectations, sad experience
Pros
The campus in DT Phoenix is pretty cool. Lots of snacks, lots of perks. Health care is great as well. Seems to be a lot of great people there as well who care about their work.
Cons
To keep things high level: -Onboarding is non-existent. When I was hired I was told I would have to do a lot of self-learning and ask questions. I’m ok with that but the systems in place to facilitate this are non-existent. This put me in a position quickly where I was struggling to get the basic information I needed to do my job. -Telecommuting - To be clear I understood when I took the job that there was an expectation of four days in office, with Fridays working at home. However the recruiter initially indicated there was some flexibility. While partially true, I found that it was deeply frowned upon not being in office. My job had no interaction with other people for the most part, and exclusively worked online. While I didn’t mind coming into office, the occasional additional remote day without scrutiny and punishment would have been ideal. Life happens, let your employees be adults and trust them to get their job done. -Management - My managers for my specific team had a pretty sharp disconnect from me. I often felt like a burden or a hassle. This was about confirmed when I resigned. Management on all teams seem to be poor at delegating. My managers took on far too much on their plate and as a result things like true people management just got lost in the mix. Why guide your new hire when you can get more face time with the SVP? Ultimately Upgrade desperately wants to be a modern Fintech Startup but operates in some pretty old school ways. Couple that with leadership that is overworked and uninvolved with their end line employees, and I opted to leave after 4 months. I would not call this environment toxic, simply disorganized. I am at a point in my career where I want to find a place to grow, and I was not confident that would ever be the case here.
