The pay was abysmal. I was fine with my initial offer based on a 40-hour work week, though it was nothing stellar. However only after you are hired do you find that at least for some positions, the company expects more than 40 hours a week as the norm. I found myself regularly putting in 50-60 hours a week, and at that point, I was effectively making less money than my last position per hour. If you have a position that has to answer to deadlines, you can't just work 40 hours and shrug it off.
A big reason for this was poor project management and expectations. It was not uncommon for someone to dump a few hours worth of work on you at the end of the day, expecting it to be done by tomorrow morning, while they ducked out early. And many people who have no idea what you actually do and how long it should take, would be setting expectations for when it should be done. Also, different departments constantly had a power struggle, so it would not be uncommon to start one thing, then be told to completely shift gears, meaning you had to work over-time because they weren't organized enough to have you working on the correct thing to begin with. Since you won't have just one boss, it amounts to a lot of stress and disorganization.
Also, some of the management team love to push their weight around and make demands that they themselves do not fulfill. A few managers were understanding and hard-working, but others loved to play weird social-experiment style head games, observe you like a zoo animal, or lecture about working long hours being part of the job while they regularly show up late and leave early. I found the regular employees to be much more pleasant overall than the management team, who are mostly there from when they company was much smaller. I think this comes down to the fact that long-standing management haven't adjusted to the fact that the company has grown a lot, and they are no longer as important as they once were. Overall management were not encouraging and helpful, and instead felt like a stereotype.
