The only job I've ever had where I was honestly a little scared to show up every morning.
Pros
-Lots of smart and talented co-workers to draw knowledge/experience from and a willingness from them to share it -Large, well-established multi-national corporation with top shelf resources/technology -Got some experience in an area I otherwise might not have (accounting) that will likely serve me well in the future
Cons
-In a year, I never heard a manager tell an employee that they did a good job -Overreactions to small mistakes as if you almost personally caused the company to go out of business -Culture was unbelievably dated with unwillingness to change and long-tenure employees who would sometimes go out of their way to make your job alot harder than it needed to be. Very few young people working there -Would rather save a few dollars than adequately staff the organization. My workload at Alcoa was 30-40% higher than at my last job. I'm a fast worker, and me and the rest of Finance were always in the office -Organization is rather flat, so there aren't clear division of responsibilities in alot of cases -I was expected to catch mistakes of other employees all over the world that were making journal entries daily. In a ledger with 1000's of transactions spread across an entire month, I was expected to close the ledger on a $1 billion annual world-wide business, bridge variances to forecast/plan down to a microscopic level, AND review all the transactions for accuracy by 6:00 PM on Workday 1 (1 Day Close) -I don't mind the extra work, it just seemed like management either had no idea how much we had to do or just didn't care enough to say anything. It wasn't until they saw our group's Life/Work balance scoring until they communicated to us that we shouldn't work so much. One group had so much free time they came up with all these new bridge analyses that senior management liked. Instead of having his group of 5 analysts be responsible for these recurring analyses, I was forced to do them all by myself. The other group simply had to copy/paste our work into a summary. -Senior management was not visible and didn't adequately address our legitimate concerns. For example, the bridge analyses went from 0 to 10 a month to 10-15 a week within a quarter's time. We weren't just bridging the important business scenarios, we were bridging all kinds of random scenarios. Eventually they started forcing us to re-do our entire Forecasting process anytime something changed. So if Marketing decided we could sell 10,000 more units the day after we did our forecast and a round of bridges, then I had to immediately re-do the Forecasting and resubmit the exact same bridges with the new data instead of waiting until the next update. During my time there, they added probably 40 hours a month of work to our plate while the group with 5 analysts didn't take on 1 new thing.
