- Work life balance: work is always expected to come first, no matter how much management will tell you the opposite. When in comes to actually enacting flexibility, they won't.
- Work from home: they are trying really hard to get back to full in-person, but are being delayed by all of the best employees leaving for the lack of modernity the company is showing. Not once have we been consulted about our preferences, all the decisions are made from above and trickles down. Middle management is spineless and is usually selected by being mouthpieces for upper management.
- whatever you do, expect your are being monitored: the company has a "data first" approach to everything, including human beings. Depending on the teams this might mean different things: making sure you come to the office on the days you planned you would a month in advance, if not your manager will receive emails; some teams (analytics) might even monitor the time away from your machine if you are taking breaks; if you tested positive to covid, they will review security cameras to check who you were in contact with (might be seen a pro, but know that you are being watched, and actually asking you who you spoke doesn't seem to be something that crosses their mind); legend says some contractors even get the number of clicks monitored, never actually heard that directly from employees so take with a grain of salt but it's 100% in line with the mentality.
- Every piece of work needs to be justified and approved by other teams, most of which would rather be forces of friction rather than try to find common solutions, even if their job is actually to assist you (yes, I'm looking at you Tech Ops). Even work that might take 1 days effort will need to be backed by 3 weeks worth of meetings, gathering metrics and a lot of politics. Unless you know someone, and things might be easier. 90% of my job became solving toxic team dynamics, red tape and admin, 1% was solving real intellectual problems, and 9% was implementing the solutions.
- ultimately weighs really hard on you and I've seen many employees loose motivation, feeling of worth and were downright miserable. After leaving the company, I've been surprise at how helpful my new colleagues were. At the fact that I had ten leaders actually using the information I was providing them with to make the workplace better for everyone. I have been contacted 4 times by Bloomberg employees wanting to leave the company as they are feeling miserable.
- on the tech side, you are forced to use in-house technology, and are being shamed if you use industry standards. Some of the things I tried to bring in: tensorflow, airflow, scikit learn, kubernetes. Instead you need to use the sub-par tools some other team is building without unit-testing it and it breaks daily (can't shame that team here as it might breach my NDA, but I'm sure employees know what I'm talking about.
- do you like counting your time spent on each task to the half hour? Hope you do. And make sure you put that as story points in your Jira ticket (!?)
Save yourself the waste of time. Someone had warned me before joining, I didn't listen because of the big name. I regret it: that's nearly 3 years of torture I could have spared myself. I would have left earlier if covid hadn't happened. When I came back to the office after covid, I found the sticker I was using to count the weeks until my planned resignation, had to postpone that for obvious reasons.
