I joined before Granular was acquired and definitely saw a negative shift in the company culture once Pioneer employees merged with Granular teams.
Looking back, I never really felt supported by my managers here. They always claimed they wanted to help me grow in my role, but never truly followed through on that. I wasn't given any opportunity to shine because they always gave me demoralizing tasks and projects.
The acquisition lead to several team re-structurings. I had 7 different managers in the span of 3 years and was shuffled off to different teams. With one exception, all of them had mediocre management, unfortunately.
There is one particular manager whose approach to "help" me involved tracking my behavior without my consent. He had his protegee, who had been acting as my direct manager, document things I said or did into a Google Doc. I was unaware that this was happening until I had a performance review meeting where the manager and his trainee presented that Google Doc to me.
The most egregious entry on there was when I had to call in sick because of a flare-up of a chronic illness. They put "sick" in quotes, the implication being I was lying about it. I suffer from a chronic illness that HR was aware of, so it seemed a bit weird to do that.
After that ordeal, I felt I could no longer trust anyone at this company. I felt like everything I said or did was being scrutinized so I became intensely afraid of messing up and became more passive as a result. I wasn't like that prior to joining Granular, and I'm not like that now at my new job at a different company. It is clear that the problem was isolated to this company.
