Unfortunately, there are a lot of things that make this place very depressing to deal with.
Starting with the benefits - even some small things you get have a catch. Like, if you connect your phone to their network they are able to see what you do with your smartphone, what you have there and where you are at any time.
The 'free fruits in the kitchen' benefit is a joke in reality. This company makes billions and yet they provide fresh fruits only once a week, one basket of the cheapest ones (apples and bananas usually) which goes away in a matter of seconds literally. And that's it for the week.
When you get hired they're trying to lower your salary claiming that you always get bonuses at the end of the year, which basically like 100% of your month salary. In reality they give bonuses solely based on their sympathy or office backroom deals, despite the fact if your actual performance is great or not. You can be a hard worker achieving all of your goals, but still will get nothing at the end of the year.
Salaries are not that high as well comparing to the current market salaries, they will bargain for every $50 in your paycheque, while wasting a shit-ton of money on managers' travels and other corporate bs.
It doesn't matter how hard you work, the only thing matters is how hard you socialize with your managers and make an appearance like you really care about all this corporate stuff that don't matter. There are so many managers in this company nobody needs it's ridiculous. And most of them don't even know what they're doing, most of the people don't even understand why some people are here and what are their roles. All these fancy scrum masters and such, doing nothing but empty talks about 'agile processes', while being utterly useless to the team. It's a joke.
And let me tell you about the meetings. The average amount of meetings is about 3-4 hours a day. Sometimes it's several hours straight until you're totally exhausted and have a headache, it's ridiculous. The same talks over and over again, while nothing really changes at all. Just corporate crap.
There are lots of people in the company doing nothing. You send requests to HR, managers and so on and they never reply or reply with some useless words in a week, or confirm your request and then do the opposite of what you asked from them. It's very frustrating really. So many parasites.
And the amount of bureaucracy is ridiculous. Whatever you're trying to achieve, be sure there is a policy for it. And just to be sure that you know all of them there is a thing called e-learning with dozens of courses you have to go through every month, spending a lot of time on it. You have to go through the whole bunch of processes, requests and papers to do a simple thing.
Considering the fact it's a pharmaceutical company treating cancer and things like that, one might think you'd get to work on some really meaningful stuff, that one can make a difference. In reality you're stuck participating in a company bureaucracy by making apps for inside use, for managers and such.
I'm actually happy to be done with this company.
