PMs and PCs are constantly overworked and under compensated. I had the sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t normal to never receive overtime for working 60 hour weeks as an entry level employee, but management always made it seem as though the issue was with Production - an efficiency or process issue, something wrong with your work style or even just wrong with you if you can’t keep up. Really, Production work their tails off and even senior level PMs frequently are unable to manage their workload within normal business hours. Work is totally screen based and management makes pains to nail home the real world implications of your work while simultaneously holding PMs to blame for circumstances completely out of their own control. Managers were dim, and had little to no language skills. I was trained by a 25 year old human turkey sandwich who could barely greet our Spanish bodega guy with an “hola”, yet faced his uninformed scrutiny for nearly 6 excruciating months of training. I cracked after a year and a few months when I started having daily panic attacks that someone would die as a result of an error on my part - management would literally say this to their PMs in the clinical trials department “someone could die if you make a mistake”, and yet PMs are expected to turn out such an unsustainable volume of work that of course errors will happen, and when they do be prepared for a lengthy blame-assignment process known as QC. Human error was not acceptable and honestly this job could probably be performed by advanced robots, which is what TransPerfect obviously would prefer. Recently I was gloriously redeemed in my suspicions that PMs and production were being robbed of overtime pay - just Google TransPerfect class action suit. So while I may get my just desserts in the end via this settlement, take heed before signing on to work at this soulless and incompetent corporate wasteland. If you’re a creative or value humanity in your work, run far away.
