Great People, Great Company - Assistant Project Manager Citidev Employee Review

I was offered this job prior to graduating college. I was provided with a company car and ipad which I could also utilize for personal use. I was provided with a letter of recommendation upon my exit from the company. I had a pretty good work-life balance and never worked more than a 40 hour week.

With the exception of the car and the ipad, I was provided with literally nothing else by the company. I personally paid for everything from gas in the company car to my own pencils and notebooks. I was also expected to regularly use my personal cell phone for business use without any type of reimbursement. There is no communal office and you are expected to work out of local cafes or coffee shops, which essentially translates into the employee paying out of pocket for a workspace. Everyone works remotely and the only “office” we had was one of the owner’s living rooms that we occasionally used for meetings. There is no company health insurance and there are no retirement benefits. Aside from the car there are really no tangible employee benefits at all. I asked the owners for the company employee manual or policy book upon accepting my offer and was told to give them a few weeks to update their literature. Throughout my entire time here I was never once given access to these documents and can still not confirm if they actually exist. I never once felt like this company had invested in me as an employee. I expected that such a small company would provide an environment with a tight-knit team and a great opportunity for mentorship. Instead I found myself in a work cycle in which I only saw my direct supervisor for an hour or so a day somewhere between 3-5 days a week. Sometimes I would even have a hard time even getting a hold of my supervisor, who made sure to take plenty of time off throughout our project. By the time I stopped working for this company he had spent a little less than 1/3rd of all of my total work days with the company on vacation. When my supervisor was around he had a habit of answering questions in a very condescending tone and often spoke to employees and subcontractors in a disparaging manner. I really felt like I didn’t matter at all to these guys, which is exactly the opposite of what I expected from such a small company. I never felt like I was set up to succeed. We did not have regularly set up internal project meetings and often times my supervisor would just show up on the jobsite unannounced after not answering my calls earlier in the day. We discussed the project schedule only a handful of times. It was unclear what expectations were from week to week given that we operated on such a sporadic meeting schedule. I was left completely in the dark on all financial aspects of projects I worked on. I was never given any concept of project budgets or labor forecasts or anything of the sort. I felt more like someone hired to be a field supervisor to a project to be held accountable for any ensuing complications, not as an actual project manager as I was lead to believe. There is absolutely nothing resembling a company culture here. Even though the company essentially consists of 3 or so managerial employees, the owners took absolutely no interest in getting to know me on any kind of personal level. I had very few non work-related conversations with coworkers or the owners while working here. These guys claim to pride themselves on being easygoing and laid back and yet my supervisor once reprimanded me for using “What’s up?” with him as a casual greeting, emphasizing that since he was my boss it was not okay to address him in this manner. That interaction alone should really say it all as far as any kind of “company culture” goes. These guys also threatened to pull my job offer if I didn’t start two weeks after graduation and then proceeded to lay me off a little less than five months later. Keep in mind I moved across the country for this job and the company provided no financial or logistical help for relocation. When I was laid off they cut me a severance check for about half of the cost of my move and took back the company car on the spot. They cited a lack of a work backlog and shrinking revenue for my layoff. (Meanwhile, they could have been training me as an estimator to help them bring in more work, but that’s a whole other conversation on how mismanaged I was here.) Then maybe two weeks later these guys appear in a San Francisco Business Times article on how the firm has been “growing by leaps and bounds”. One of the owners is quoted providing an incredibly cheesy analogy comparing the company’s growth to climbing a mountain. He states that after the company’s initial “rock climbing experience” they’ve reached a level of success with “this amazing view” from where they can now just “run downhill”. What a joke. They’re running downhill all right. I really couldn’t believe this level of audacity. I once tried to use my letter of recommendation from this company in a future job interview and was told by my interviewer that he didn’t care about the opinion of an owner who is laying off employees in today’s booming construction market. I could honestly fill up a few more pages with some frustrating stories and other issues I had with this company but I will spare the details. Bottom Line: If you have a college degree you have no business working here. I’ve had internships that I’ve learned much more from, not to mention have lasted longer. These guys wear sneakers on site. That should say it all. Total waste of my time.