5 Ways to Tell How Well a Potential Employer Would Treat You as an Employee

[Posteritatis]

68. #4's definitely a big one

I just finished working at a company that was - by design - in crisis mode all the time.

Everything was critical, urgent, missing something would be a disaster, we just committed in writing to the client that we'd have this done in an hour, etc. etc. etc. People would actually delay passing on assigned tasks (or changes to tasks!) to people further down the chain like myself in order to cause additional stress, because the owner believed that stress is fun and makes people work better. "Get her done now" was one of the most common statements in the building, right next to "drop what you're working on and do this instead."

The fun thing is that the switch to the worst of that mindset started right after they brought some management consultants in for a couple of weeks. The place was always in disaster mode, but an extra layer of panic and urgency started showing up right after the consultant was finished.

Naturally all that stuff caused people to get frazzled and screw up things more often and so on, which of course contributed to the crises, which convinced some of the managers people were simply Throwing Themselves Into The Importance Of It All, yadda yadda argh.

I certainly don't miss the place.