Pros
It is employment, kinda sorta.
Cons
The stories you’ve heard are true, it’s a modern day sweatshop. They are hopelessly understaffed, and intentionally so, because it saves them money. They will heap a simply impossible amount of work upon you. You will find yourself spending your entire workday wandering from pointless meeting to pointless meeting. During each conference, you will have several hours of work assigned to you, with no time to actually perform the assigned tasks. At the end of the day, management will simply tell you to “get it done for tomorrow”. The implication being that you’re supposed to get out of work, and then go back to work - from home during the evening. I regularly get email from my coworkers around 3:00 AM because they’re still up at that hour doing the work that they were assigned during the day. They come in to work exhausted the next morning, looking like death warmed over, because they were up working all night and got no sleep. It is common for management to dump 20+ hours of work onto your lap at 4:00 PM on Friday afternoon and order you to have it completed for Monday morning - so much for your weekend. Needless to say, there will be no time for vacations. Just work, work, and more work. What kind of a life is this? I’ve seen young kids in their early 20’s need to be on medication just so they can cope with their jobs. It will eventually catch up to you and make you sick. When that happens, you become a liability. It would expose the company to further liability if they were to terminate you because they made you sick, so instead they will try to torture you into quitting on your own. They will double down when you are on the verge of collapsing and heap even more work upon you. They will write falsely negative performance reviews and otherwise make you so miserable that you just can’t stand it anymore. If you refuse to quit, you will simply be eliminated in their next round of contrived layoffs, which are pretty much constantly ongoing. Then they will bring in a fresh piece of meat to replace you and work them to death next. I have never seen such an incredible rate of turnover. They should install a revolving door on the front of the building, oh wait, they did! Seriously, the rate of sickness and heart attacks is shocking, several people have even died. It all boils down to one word: EXPLOITATION. Maximum exploitation of everything and everyone that they come into contact with. I have never seen such a Marxist commodification of human beings. During my orientation, the HR rep actually said “We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” (look up the science fiction reference if you’re not familiar with Star Trek). They went on to tell us that “EMC stands for ‘Eventually Marriage Counseling’ because of all the long hours that we are going to make you work”. They might as well say “welcome to the company, we’re going to ruin your marriage”. Honestly, they actually said these things to us during our orientation! They expect you to put the company before all else in your life. It is supposed to come before your home, your family, your relationships, your happiness and even your health. This loyalty and dedication will not be returned though, in fact, they will screw you in a heartbeat if it saves them a nickel. Virtue is a vice at this place and they are an inhuman calculating machine that operates completely without a conscience. Their employees mean absolutely nothing to them and “corporate ethics” truly is a contradiction in terms here. There is a striking lack of policy regarding the treatment of workers, and a striking lack of enforcement for what little policy there is. They will berate you, humiliate you, belittle you, insult you and torture you. Coercion is basically the only form of motivation that they know. If your manager wants to put a gun to your head in order to extract an additional 3% output, well that’s just fine with the executives – in fact, it’s commendable. They basically let managers do whatever they want. And you know what they say about absolute power… HR is complicit in the corruption. When management wants to screw you, it is HR’s function to basically “grease the skids” and see that it is done in such a way that does not expose the company to liability. They are experts in re-writing history, deception, underhanded behavior, dishonesty and getting around the law. It's like something out of the dark ages. You are not going to get a chance to tell your side of the story, you will simply be ambushed on your way into work on some random day. It’s every dirty trick in the book, and several more that they have invented on their own. Every argument is one-sided and they’ve basically discovered that dictatorship is a very efficient form of government. As a condition of being hired, you are forced to sign the most onerous and draconian document that I have ever seen. It includes such conditions as allowing the company to access your private email accounts and waiving your right to sue. That’s right, you must give up your 7th Amendment rights and agree to resolve any disputes through their arbitration process. I can just imagine what kind of justice you will get from the company court. Just why do you think they’re doing this? Every relationship is adversarial, rather than cooperative. Management against workers, groups against other groups, workers against each other. Once management realizes that you don’t trust them anymore, they will approach you through someone that you do trust (usually a colleague) and screw you through them. You will eventually arrive at the accurate conclusion that you can’t trust anyone. This culture is completely toxic, but they ridiculously try to sell it as “excellence”. Incompetent people are constantly promoted to senior level positions, while exceptional workers are trapped in menial jobs. It gets to the point where titles don’t mean anything at all. They would much rather hire cheap workers than talented ones. They especially prefer foreigners or young kids who can be tricked into performing multiple people’s jobs and working 80 hours per week for low pay. Key contributors are regularly eliminated because management basically figures that they have already extracted most of what they’re going to get out of them. Politics is king and the old boy network truly runs the place. Working here is like being trapped in a spider’s web: the more you try to struggle, the more entangled you'll become, and it will eventually kill you. Ultimately, it’s just best to stay away from this place.