“Expected to go down to the bar at the end of the week with your co-workers and drink away half your pay cheque to numb the pain.”

“In my experience it means you'll be constantly overworked and stressed and expected to go down to the bar at the end of the week with your co-workers and drink away half your pay cheque to numb the pain.”

"This means (and I’m living it now): There’s no onboarding. No training. No process. No policies. Everything is everywhere. Getting other teams to work with you is not going to happen easily.

But you are responsible for chasing them down constantly and will never know when they have changed their answer to something, so you WILL have to chase down an answer to everything, every time. Our customers are mad at us because we take forever to do anything and give conflicting information, but we don’t know why and aren't curious about it. And if you don't complain about this and if you work 60 hours a week to do what could take you 30 if we acted normally, we will call you a 'rockstar' sometimes in Slack.”

“Buddy's wife worked for a company that instituted UPTO. The first year of UPTO she took off the same number of days off she had taken the previous year. She was called into a boss' office with her immediate boss and HR in there and told that she was in the top 10% of PTO takers. She is really good with the 'don't give a shit' attitude when she knows she is in the right. She asked if she was getting her job done. Her immediate boss said 'yes' – so she said 'I guess we are done here – I have work to do' and walked out. Still at the same place, and I believe they just got rid of the UPTO ‘benefit’.

The buddy was at one of her company events and was speaking with a programmer. He asked about the ‘benefit’ and was told it was BS – the programmer had to get approval and approval was not given if a deadline was coming up... and amazingly there was always a deadline approaching...”

 "I had already been kind of creeped out during the interview when they walked me around the office afterwards and everyone was hunched over their desks and not talking to each other, and that comment during the offer made me run for the hills.”

"The random interactions and in-person collaboration all but vanished, because when there were cubicles, people would go chat with each other all the time, was more private, etc, didn’t feel like people were looking over your shoulder all the time. 

Open office, nobody talked with anybody (the execs literally believed random strangers from different groups would overhear work discussions and jump in with neat collab ideas or some BS), and was exacerbated by a ‘phased return to office’ such that if you weren't in the same physical site as your team, there was effectively no reason to be in the office (because what friends you did have were likely on a different rotation). 

Moreover, any noise, talking, typing, coughing, walking — any noise carried, making it harder to focus. Combined with the lack of privacy, productivity suffered. No matter how ‘hip’ and ‘exciting’ open office sounds, trust me, you're gonna want a dedicated cubicle.”