Primer Reviews

Rewritten this a few times because I don’t want it to come across as overly harsh: Very long working hours. It was (and I'm sure still is) normal for people to work long hours there - I'd be working until 10/11pm at night regularly, plus at least a few hours on the weekend. This was totally normalised and expected. I was frequently asked by my line manager to work on the weekend. Did I receive emails from other members in the team past midnight on weekends? Yes. Do other people work weekends and late into the night? Yes. Were folk regularly on Slack at midnight? Yes. After communicating that I was struggling with my workload, the expectations and the hours, I was told to improve my time management and to ‘just operationalise everything’ without any more explanation. I couldn’t sustain working like this and ended up burning out badly - asking to take a month off work (as someone else in the team had done when citing burnout) was refused because ‘it’s a totally different situation as you don’t have kids’. Someone in the team had gone to my line manager expressing concern that I was burning out months earlier; when I resigned I was told this had been a mark against my name. I wish I'd taken the burnout warnings seriously because for the first time in my life I ended up on antidepressants and exhausted. The long hours combined with the often unfriendly and combative working environment can easily grind people down, especially if they are more sensitive or work in a creative field. I comforted 8 people who were either crying on video calls or considering resigning (some have since quit, some still work there). I also comforted people crying post interviews. A lot of these people were women. I don’t think this helps create an inclusive working environment. There’s a lack of structure which I think is due to this being the founder’s first company? There were no budgets set for anything, yet you’d be told things you wanted to do were out of budget, which was pretty maddening. I personally had no formal 1.1s or set expectations or feedback, unless I sought it out. It all made for a pretty confusing and chaotic place to work - which of course you expect to some extent with a start-up, but this really took it to an extreme.

Bad management is ruining the company's culture and probably the business; Leadership handled the layoff of almost 90 people (50% of the company) pretty badly, showcasing a lack of management knowledge, consideration and overall disinterest for their employees - not replying to emails, not following up on the referral they said they would do - #redwedding style; There's a feeling of unhappiness around everyone who"survived" the 50% cut, but the overall conversation about bad management keeps pretty much alive.