Awful place. Horrible experience. Nightmare onboarding.
Day 1-3 spent on tech issues.
I started over a month after receiving my offer letter and they were still not prepared. First, I wasn’t provisioned properly on the back end so I was unable to get into the system. I did all of my meeting calls from my personal cellphone. Red Flag. When IT finally fixed the provisioning issue on the back end, it was time to download all of their tools. They were not preinstalled. Red flag (side note: in my previous roles, they were either pre installed or a week before your start date, you’d receive an email with your logins so you’d be up and running smoothly from day one). That was a nightmare in itself. They stated their practice is to install everything as a group on the first day on a zoom call with IT. But guess what? Nightmare wasn’t over, we then realized we couldn’t download any of the necessary apps, they sent me a laptop with zero storage space. How could a brand new laptop have no storage out the box? So now it’s day 2 and I am waiting for a new laptop to be delivered and dropping off the defective one at UPS. UPS is 20 blocks away from me so I had to go out of my way. So now that I missed the tech setup call and a few other meetings within that time, I had to read along a sheet to figure out what I needed to download. The training is for 2 weeks and everyday you have specific workflows to do. So already I lost 2 days of this workflow in a brand new role. They buddied you with a teammate who was really kind, however it didn’t cancel out the horrible first impression. I usually a very positive and upbeat person but was so miserable there within a few days. They end up having to replace the laptop. So now it’s day 3 laptop replaced and I am playing catch up on my lessons while making sure I don’t miss any of the meetings scheduled on my calendar. Some of them were even double booked so I had to reach out to my buddy to see which ones were a priority. On day 9, (which is technically day 7 not counting Saturday and Sunday) I was so behind and overwhelmed, I was still on day 3 Of my lessons. I even stayed working until 10pm to catch up my lessons and planned on working some more over the weekend because I really wanted to make things work. My learning style is to take my time, digest it, pause, take lots of notes so granted I am not moving at a quick enough pace for them. At 6pm on day 9 one of the managers wanted to get on a call so I stopped my lessons and spent 30 minutes on a call with him. At 6:30pm, I went back to my lessons. An hour and a half later, at 8pm at night on day 9, a different managers slacked me that she was putting time on my calendar for 9am the next day. Another red flag because why are you messaging folks at 9pm at night when the work day begins at 8:30pm and ends at 5:30-6pm. Until this point, neither of them reached out to even welcome me as a new starter. Even after they finally set up my work email, I started getting emails to my personal email, they’d already sign me up to 4 different websites not related to my role without my permission. Red flag.
Now’ it’s day 10, second week since starting. I start my lessons at 8:30am. At 9am on day 10, I have to stop for the call with leadership. She proceeds to interrogate me as to why I am so behind. Claims she is here to help, but offers zero help. She pulled up my completed lessons, shared her screen then proceeded to drill me about why some lessons started one day, and finished another day and why it was taking me so long and demanded that I gave an explanation. I was shocked and appalled at the nice nasty that was being displayed from someone in leadership. I let her know, I was taking my time to digest the information without being overwhelmed. She stated “this was a fast past role and fast past company”. So, to make her happy, I stopped taking notes and did my best to read as quickly as possible to catch up on my lessons in 3 hours, as we had meetings for most of the day. I wanted her to see that I did care and would get my work done, even if I had to stay past 10pm a second night in a row. I went from 3 completely lessons to 6 completed lessons in 3 hours. I thought they would be happy. I thought things would be less stressful now but Guess what? Another manager reached out, later on in the day, around 4pm, right after our meetings, so again, I pause my lessons that I’m trying to catch up on to get on another call, but this time it was to question me on why I completed my lessons so quickly. They were watching me on the backend and saw that I was struggling but said nothing and waiting just to complain. I did what they asked but and felt that I was now moving too quickly. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. On the call I was asked not to rush, which was a completely different conversation and tone from earlier that morning. After giving it some thought, I realized that although the pay is great, and it’s a good tool, it’s a very TOXIC ENVIRONMENT. It felt like maccro aggressions, passive aggressive and hostile work environment all combined. Not to mention, the added meetings just took time away from catching up on my lessons that I would never be behind on if they were organized enough to provisioned my account so I could access it. Also wouldn’t be being had they provided me with the tools I needed for success such as working computer on my start date. I quit on day 10, right after the second meeting. No amount of money is worth my peace of mind and wellbeing.
To make it worst, on one of their recorded meetings during the assigned lessons, someone joked about not caring if they were legally collecting personal data and the employee laughed and made a joke about being in sales. I’ve always worked in sales and we always stressed on having legal and ethical practices so it that made me very uncomfortable. I just hope they don’t try to use any of my personal information because I do not consent!
I also want to add, they had a full channel of people begging for help with their tech issues who also started when I did. I heard more than one person say they even had to use their personal laptops because one wasn’t mailed to them. Very disappointing for such a large company to be so disorganized. Especially since they tell you, you have no expectation of privacy. There were a few really nice people there but overall, very toxic and awful onboarding experience, with lots of micromanaging and passive aggressiveness from leadership.
