Vantaggi
- Health insurance options are quite good. Anthem Silver/Gold/Platinum or Kaiser - 401k matching 4% of your 5% contribution if I remember correctly. - If you live in East Bay, the commute to Downtown Oakland is very nice - Many of the lower-ranked colleagues are incredible workers and human beings. There is a handful of the small staff I would kill to work with again. - There are quarterly bonuses, but they aren't very substantial. I was netting $200-300 per quarter. - If you have a background in customer support and you want to transition into HR, you'll get some fantastic experience. I transitioned careers because of the experience I gained and also emotionally, I was driven to move into a position to help and protect the rights of other wave slaves. - If you want to be in the start-up world, you can really foster a ton of great connections. I made friends with many of my clients and I still talk to a good amount of them. I don't think I'll be working in the start-up world again, but it never hurts to know interesting and innovative people.
Svantaggi
Where do I begin... - If you're interviewing, ask for about $20,000 more than you actually want and let them talk you down. I didn't ask for enough and frankly I feel like I was used when I found out that another colleague with very similar experiences to me when I started made the same as me after a year and a sizeable raise. Be arrogant when you state your salary and let them talk you down. There is NO salary transparency at all - girl gotta fight for herself. - You'll be salaried and so you won't be compensated for overtime. Our hours are 9-5 with hour lunch and they added a policy last year to "create a work-life balance" that we were all supposed to come in early, stay an extra hour, or work from home one additional hour to compensate for our hour lunch. How does...working more...improve work life balance? - I feel that favoritism is a rampant aspect of the company culture. If you're well-liked by management, you lay upon a soft cloud of privileges. You can work where/when you want, the rules for requesting time off suddenly don't apply to you and you can convince the upper echelons of management that you have too intense of a workload when other, less liked individuals have tons of clients and are literally swimming in emails. If you can be in the in-crowd at this job, I think this job could be fun, cushy and great. I was not in the in-crowd, and furthermore, I felt that there was a culture of trying to make my work life highly unpleasant, spearheaded by the most powerful person in the company. But maybe that's my own paranoia, combining bad things that happened to me into one really bad narrative. I don't know. - I thought, when I started, this would be great, working with a gay CEO (in previous jobs, I've endured a lot of harassment for being a feminine gay man). HA I couldn't have been so wrong. This person literally mocked my voice in the office, around a bunch of my colleagues. I had to call him out on this. Y'all, mocking or slandering unchangeable traits of a person are....HARASSMENT. Legally. Look it up. This same person has also tried to sleep with my husband multiple times, going so far as literally sticking his hand down my husband's pants in a bar bathroom where...right outside the bathroom was myself, the another manager, and another wage slave. Oh and there's the part where he's apologized for hitting on us both when he's drunk multiple times and then literally does it later that night. I. Have. Receipts. (screenshots of apologetic "oh god I'm so sorry I hope I didn't cross any boundaries" receipts. Look, I can SAY you didn't cross boundaries, but you held my job over my head - girl gotta pay rent. I'm obviously not going to tell you, that you crossed boundaries and then, oh shoot! You fired me). The CEO walks up to various men in his office and gives them shoulder massages and then asks "are you OK with this?" Please see like above about how I'm not going to say no because I need to pay my bills. If there were an objective HR person, maybe I would have said some things about these problems prior to a week before my last day. But since the CEO was the HR manager and...well...he was the one doing all this stuff, I did not feel safe. One of the most disappointing things for me was in my last weeks, I wrote a very lengthy resignation letter outlining in professional terms basically all of *waves arms* this and the cofounder sounded like he was going to take it seriously, which I really appreciated. But I was so, so disappointed, that I didn't hear ANYTHING from my direct manager. I honestly thought she might at least support me a bit, but no. Nothing. I had a whole additional page I was honestly too depressed to send to the whole management team about the sexual harassment I experienced and I WAS going to give it to her because, I stupidly thought, she might at least empathize a bit. I was so wrong about that. I realized in my last week there that I wasn't paranoid. Really, nobody cared about the messed up stuff happening, and he'll keep going on being a powerful person. No part of me doubts he will reproduce this behavior on a new employee. I really, really, really don't want another young, poor queer to have to deal with what I had to deal with. It was screwed up and I'm frankly not OK. I'm not sure how long it will even take FOR me to be OK about the things that happened to me.