I was hired as contract to help with a drowning department until the position for which I was actually hired opened up. I was told it was a new company and I would be the project manager overseeing the rollout of the offices. But first they wanted me to do contract for a month and that way I'd learn how processes already in place worked.
Associa owns a bunch of smaller companies managing different aspects of HOA communities managed, and are almost all run by 2-4 admins and managed by a VP/SVP. Mgmt was always AWOL. Like... they moved to different states. On the rare occasion our mgr VP was at the office, he'd schedule a dept meeting then proceed to "wrap up" a bunch of who even knows what for anywhere from 10-45 minutes and made us sit there in silence waiting on him, which was a serious waste of our time considering the huge stacks of pending, time-sensitive work. On one occasion I actually walked out of his office after 40 minutes, because I had to get back to hand-typing out 3 page pdf scans of property deeds in the 100's of properties. They don't have scan to text software, which was infuriatingly inefficient. We were also routinely pulled off our work to do personal projects not related to work for other SVPs.
The girls I worked with had not gotten a performance review or raise in over two years. After I had already left I learned that they finally got their reviews and raises. It was a 1.5-2% pay increase, which doesn't even cover the increase cost of living especially after 2 years. When I asked if there was any kind of idea on when the company I would be overseeing the rollout of was set to start, the answer I got made it very clear that the VP had been saying that for almost a year at that point. Meaning I was hired as an admin with the promise of project management, the reason I took the job, with no end in sight to the data entry which is far below my skill level. I left and it was a mutual decision. It was a huge waste of my time.
