- Massively negative culture; people don't even smile or make eye contact in the hall. There isn't much cheer; people like to joke about how bureaucratic and dysfunctional the company is, but more in the way someone might make a joke about their depression, then give a clipped laugh and stare off into the distance for a bit.
- The environment is incredibly cliquish and toxic. People are openly hostile towards one another. You can't get much help from the people apathetically coasting, and most people who actually care about the job will throw you under the bus to make themselves look good. Abrasive and caustic behavior is met with shrugs from management, who will see an individual who clashes with everyone and instead coach everyone else on how to capitulate to that individual.
- Everything is incredibly bureaucratic. Reporting our time spent on different projects was a constant tug-of-war, and a large percentage of meeting time would be spent hemming and hawing over how to fill out a time sheet. Work is very redundant, and you'll pretty much spend all day checking, double-checking, or triple-checking someone else's work.
- One hour-long meeting was devoted on how to send an email. Full stop.
- My first paycheck was sent to Portland, Maine. When I reached out for help sending a new check so I could buy groceries and pay rent, payroll (in Texas) was mainly interested in denying that any mistake was made, and that the check would probably get to me eventually. They finally relented and said they'd send a new check. A week later, I reached out to see if it was on its way. Their response: "Are you sure you want me to cancel the original check and send a new one? If the first one does show up, you can't cash it!"
- Everything is chaotic and mismanaged; over the course of a single year, I was tasked with a project, then had it handed it off to a new employee, only to have it handed back to me once that employee moved on to a new position or company, only to hand it back to the next newbie. This happened repeatedly; things are constantly in transition and you never really get your feet under you. I'd be trained on systems and projects, only to never get assigned to them. The party line is that things are just in flux due to PECI being acquired by CLEAResult, but that acquisition happened years before I got there, and things were no less settled when I left.
- People train you by having you "shadow" them, which means you sit next to them and watch them work. One particular employee did this silently, not explaining any of his processes; I had to ask him what he was doing at every step. This meant that even six months down the line, he'd send emails harshly reprimanding me for not knowing steps and contingencies he'd never mentioned. When I turned to my manager for help, I was again coached on how to better adapt to his taciturn surliness.
- Compensation is dreadful. Don't expect more than 25 cents more an hour each year. Once my manager reprimanded me for speaking about my pay with other employees, which is massively unethical, but really only spoke to my manager's ignorance and inexperience than anything.
- At one point, I absorbed the entire workload of an existing employee, with the promise that a new hire would be coming on, and the load was only temporary. Weekly, my manager would say they were working on it. After a few weeks without this regular empty reassurance, I asked for a progress update on the hire and my manager played dumb, then called several of my colleagues into a meeting room and made me delegate my work to them. In the end, my manager made me hand off most of my work, and I was then underworked. I didn't mention it, out of fear of the pendulum swinging too far the other way.
- One of the senior managers would leave her phone at her desk with the ringer on. It was some crummy electronic-piano version of "Bad to the Bone" and I still hear it on the wind during stormy nights.
