Pay was not worth the stress - Anonymous employee Hexagon Employee Review

I am on the autism spectrum, and for me, the Madison, AL, location was virtually designed for maximum sensory and emotional stress. The building uses an open-floor layout, so I didn’t just feel perpetually exposed, but also extremely vulnerable, since I could not see if I was being approached. Additionally, the unrelenting noise of the open floor (phones, conversations, movement) rendered concentration impossible, as I could not tune any of it out. What’s more, our side-by-side desks were placed cosily, to say the least, with vestigial dividers separating co-workers, and worrying about co-workers’ inevitable intrusions into my personal space at any moment very nearly made me physically ill. Finally, and most distressing of all, job performance—and by extension, job security—is partially evaluated on how well co-workers like you and how sociable you are. As I am on the spectrum, social interaction is difficult enough, but this criterion heightened my anxiety to an intolerable degree, especially as there are simply no remedies for normal interpersonal friction. Good salary or not, for me, the job was not worth the psychological toll it took.