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.
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.