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.
I’ve worked minimum wage for big corporations and for small business tyrants.
The small business tyrants were worse, more likely to outright ignore regulations and laws, and tried to get away with some shit that wouldn’t be worth the trouble of burdening a big corporation’s legal team.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I’m avoiding working at small businesses now, I think. Last one sucked ass and I can’t handle some fucking chud owner with $300,000 worth of cars and trucks being too cheap to pay out for a broken bike lock one of his workers mistakenly bolt-cutted and refuses to hire more than the absolute bare minimum of workers. Working nights at Wal-Mart was more relaxing than working there.
I’m very lucky in that my boss is nearly as broke as I am. He didn’t pay himself a salary when I first started, which is fucking admirable, but it also means that I’m not really in a position to ask for my value.
If the guy was a prick I would feel less inclined to work my ass off lol
Although they’re not the same as startups, I’m gonna bring up small businesses. A lot of people who complain about le small business tyrants don’t seem to understand there are benefits and trade offs with both types of exploitation
Big business:
- more scrutiny which often means they want to avoid any conflict as soon as possible
- some are large enough that you falling behind won’t really matter
- possible to start fresh even within the same company
- people are usually more conscience of how companies are against their interest
- but you can become complacent with your exploitation when met with more benefits or more comfortable work conditions
Small business:
- often community based, so people will often look the other way when complaints and exploitation occur
- may actually serve the community without being too alienated from the people or their needs
- likely to exploit undocumented people (ime), though the alternative is much worse
- like a small town, people will remember faces, and controversy is looked down upon, and favors, discretion, and extra work are expected
- people are more hesitant to lump small businesses with every other company that exploits workers and consumers (some warranted, but mostly out of misconceptions about small businesses)
On a related note, never hire your family and friends to do anything lol. If they volunteer, cool, but if you need someone to be liable for damages or alterations, utilize discounts, or ask for additional work without generating drama, go with an outsider.
I prefer larger orgs mainly because I need money, but I’d much rather be closer to my community.
Usually have more job security in smaller orgs in my experience but they’re always incredibly dysfunctional. Large orgs run like clockwork, but there’s always a risk of being a victim of RIF (I guess that’s why org really but large orgs do them seemingly at random)
There are good small shops too, but yeah if you find a place that doesn’t really keep tabs just stick it out there. Best advice I can offer.
Are you my coworker? He keeps doing stuff on nights and weekends and me and the other guy keep telling him to stop.
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