Just the title. I’ve been pulling some crazy all-nighters and I’m absolutely exhausted, and I’m remembering a time when I could comfortably say “fuck off” without any mixed feelings. Now I feel some perverse responsibility to kill myself for our project and I kind of hate myself for it.
Start ups are fucking awful, they always expect you to work way too much, every single person i know who worked for a startup says it was awful
in my experience, large orgs are where it’s at. more redundancy, more workers per boss, more “bosses” with less institutional power / buy-in, more of a culture of trying to avoid turnover rather than boundary less toxicity to drive away troublemakers.
shitty shit can still totally happen in larger orgs for sure, but some of the most toxic shit I’ve ever seen was in little orgs where there’s no HR, steward or ombud to act as a check on a bad boss by reminding them how much a lawyer costs per hour and how it’ll turn the bean counters against them.
I’m definitely missing my last job at a big firm.
Granted, a job is still a job, and the threat of being fired is always there, but there was a certain ambivalence that came with it when things went to shit that I could cope with.
With this small company I am emotionally invested and it’s hard to detach from it at the end of the day. Shit sucks.
totally. there is no escape. the worst bs I’ve ever seen was working at a “small family business” where the hired in employee has to be an emotional buffer between two spouses who gave conflicting directives and have weird passive aggressive communication issues.
that isn’t a one-off either. I worked in that situation. a friend of mine worked in one almost exactly like it. I also worked in two other tiny operations where the owners were just lame assholes, but we few employees had to pretend like they were cool and hang out with them socially to keep their mood elevated or they’d get depressed and whine about quitting the business. fucking cringe central.
My SIL just left a job like that. It was a wife and husband, and the wife would routinely stiff the warehouse workers and then ghost them, and my sister in law would answer the angry calls from the warehouse and have to pretend like the owners weren’t there.
Fucking awful. Small business owners have this tendency to behave like entitled children.
I’m very lucky that my boss is as respectable/considerate a person as I could hope for, but he’s incapable of telling clients ‘no’ so we’re completely drowning in the shit.
When I was younger I worked for a small business (I mean, it was a McDonald’s franchise, but it’s not like I talked to corporate ever) and calling in was like pulling teeth.
One time I called in and my manager asked about sending another employee to pick me up. It was unreal.
Now I work for a company that has frequently got 1000 people all doing the same job simultaneously and while they’re not cool with people calling in literally every other day, they know the average amount of days a person calls in and if you’re under that they don’t give a shit because with 1000 people you are forced to recognize that as a cost of doing business. You just hire 8% more employees than you expect to need or whatever.
Nobody at this company has ever asked if I was really sure I couldn’t come in, nobody wants to know how exactly I’m sick, etc etc.
Not that there aren’t downsides, but I never want the person who owns the entity I work for to say a word to me. I don’t want that motherfucker to know I exist. They belong 7 rungs higher than me on an org chart minimum, and hopefully in a different state.
Definitely not all large companies are like this. The large company I worked for supplied us with enough hours you could barely call it a skeleton crew.
And god forbid someone called out, you would become a week behind in one day.
I’d argue small businesses are just more likely to either be much better or much worse, and large companies will typically be ‘average’. Small businesses can fly under the radar on so many laws, and can either serve their local community in spite of lost profit, or on the other hand more effectively exploit local spikes in unemployment. Large businesses can’t micromanage that hard and are forced to be held to account.
My position is that if a small business looks good (ie, the boss isn’t a chud/slave driver), then I’d happily work for 'em. Whereas most large businesses are just always the same.
