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You'll also be exposed to: near-stupendous degrees of waste, inefficiency, and general head-in-the-sand-i-tude. Like: signing up for a $140k/year "consulting" gig, but having a secretary pick your sole "workstation", a 12-inch, low-memory Lenovo model normally given to sales people. Or: going through an grueling process ostensibly designed to assure that you have truly l33t skills in analytic and quantitative thinking skills... only to be herded into a dungeon-like cubicle farm with crass overhead lightin, poor ventilation, non-stop chatter and blaring overhead TVs, making it impossible to think straight for more than 5 seconds... where you end up plugging away for 10-, 12-, 14-hour days. Or: being hired ostensibly for your senior-level experience in platform X, only to have every decision "vetted" by utterly inexperienced H1-Bs, whose personal coding style reminds you, without irony, of something you last flinched at seeing on The Daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com/). Not to mention: not infrequent episodes of not just hot-headness, but outright bullying and borderline psychological violence. And generally: a stifling atmosphere which makes it basically impossible to have an honest conversation with anyone in upper management about the day-to-day realities of the environment they ostensibly expect you to be delivering this supposedly highly valuable, mission-critical software under. Granted, this was at "mid-tier" companies, and I (thought) I knew what I was getting into. Still, the reality was far ruder -- and far more weird and just plain absurd, at times-- than any of my worst expectations. |