How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
Pros
The people. God bless the people. If this company is the crumbling façade of a once-great institution, then the employees are the ivy growing over it — brilliant, resilient, and somehow still making it look presentable from a distance. I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the most intelligent, empathetic, and wildly diverse individuals here — the kind of colleagues who make the slow descent into corporate absurdity feel almost tolerable. Also, credit where it’s due: the location is excellent. Right in the beating heart of London — or at least what’s left of it after the endless construction. With seamless public transit access, it’s never been easier to commute to confusion.
Cons
Working at this firm in 2025 feels like bearing witness to the twilight of the British Empire — not the glorious kind with trumpets and waving flags, but the sad, creaky decline where no one can quite explain why Gibraltar still exists and everyone’s pretending the tea still tastes the same. Once a bulwark of industry, this organisation has become a haunted museum of mismanagement, where the tour guides wear lanyards and speak exclusively in acronyms. Ever since the new CEO and their ever-expanding Council of Confusion took the wheel, the company has been riding a rickety carriage of “strategic pivots” off a cliff, and calling it “agile transformation.” The result? A year-long séance of chaotic rebranding, ghost policies, and leadership-by-astrology. If you squint hard enough, you might mistake it for vision. And then, the Integration Project. Ah yes. The so-called magnum opus — a grandiose merging of cultures, ideals, and working hours, primarily yours. What was meant to be a transatlantic symphony is now a frantic kazoo solo, scored by people who’ve clearly never seen a calendar or met a colleague outside their own tax bracket. I've had three managers this year, and different client types. At this point, I’m expecting my houseplants to start supervising me. Employee morale? Let’s just say it’s buried somewhere beneath the ruins of “flexibility,” a word now used exclusively to describe how easily they can twist policies to make things worse. We are now expected to schedule our own calls, while being treated to generous cutbacks in leave, benefits, and promotion opportunities — just in time for the festive season. Happy corporate winter! And let’s talk about this dystopian masquerade ball where management parades through four-day office mandates while simultaneously gutting teams like it’s a Black Friday sale. Nothing says “we value our people” quite like layoffs dressed in euphemism and sushi dinners served in five-star hotels, presumably under the impression we are 18th-century French peasants who should be grateful for stale croissants and GLG branded baseball caps. Speaking of which — reward points? Really? You think dangling a GLG-branded cap in front of exhausted employees, like a carrot before a mule, is going to distract from the fact that you’ve stripped away every scrap of stability we had? Why not throw in a participation ribbon that says “I survived Q1”? Meanwhile, as the C-suite expands faster than the Roman Empire at its peak (and will likely collapse just as spectacularly), the rest of us are left to interpret the cheers for initiatives that read like they were designed by a malfunctioning TED Talk generator. The truth is simple: if your goal was to drain every ounce of enthusiasm, kill off morale, and transform a once-respected institution into a parody of late-stage capitalism, then — truly, bravo. The curtain has fallen, the empire is dust, and all that remains is a pile of HR policies and discarded sushi trays.
