NIH reviews

They treated me worse than a technician since I was basically a glorified secretary. They got mad at me unless I worked 14-16 hours a day for less than 30k a year after graduating from an ivy league school even though none of the postdocs worked more than 6 hours a day. All I did was schedule patient meetings and they said if I wanted any learning opportunities I had to get them on my own time which they didn't even leave me time for and everything that went wrong regardless of whether it was my fault, such as patients not showing up to appointments, was blamed on me. They didn't even allow me to go to poster sessions that every other IRTA went to, since I hadn't finished scheduling enough patients which was impossible since half of them would by default not show up anyways. Half the IRTAs in my lab rage quit before their time was up. I wish I had done the same long ago as I got nothing out of it as all I did was scheduling and I got no posters abstracts or publication. I finally rage quit after my boss sent me an angry email for not coming in and working/ managing schedules on Christmas eve, which was announced to be a holiday for every other NIH employee, while my boss himself took 2 weeks off.

While there are many opportunities to contribute to make a difference, there are equally number of old school employees and managers who are stuck in their positions and don't allow progress. There is no fair opportunity for job growth based on qualifications. Managers engage in discrimination and retaliation against their employees. Some employees engage time in fraud where they don't even show up to work while others abuse telework by doing little to nothing when working from home. There are positions that are designed to park FTE's until they decide to retire. They have no responsibilities other than to collect paychecks. This costs government and ORF millions of dollars. Overall environment is very toxic and management is well aware of problems but unwilling to do anything to enforce existing policies or provide oversight. They follow basic unwritten policy of no news is good news and look the other way. Some managers cheat, copy ideas, and get credit for work performed by their employees. Some even copy entire email text written by someone else and forward it up the chain as their own hence stealing ideas and getting credit for something they did not contribute. One manager told me once, if you have ideas go somewhere else. We don't care about ideas here at (ORF)