- Undermining Elsevier. This was the most disturbing part of this job. Even though they're owned by Elsevier, they would badmouth/ridicule Elsevier at every opportunity. I had to deal with Elsevier a lot, and I was consistently told to promise Elsevier what they asked for and then ignore them and do what Mendeley wanted. I was deeply uncomfortable with that, since I was working with high level management in Elsevier with whom I got along very well, and lying to them could hurt my career opportunities.
- Unprofessional behavior. For example, employees denigrating Elsevier representatives and trainers via a private chat channel, while those people are sitting right in front of them. Or employees putting on 'cat ears' on their webcam during teleconference meetings.
- Lack of resources. There were no phones, and we received no company mobile phone. We were expected to use our own mobile phones, at our own cost, to make calls. We had to use our personal Skype accounts as well. The office was so loud, at times I had to have teleconferences in the broom closet just to hear our client. Hard to do work on Fridays as well, when you're still working on a project and they're blaring loud music through the office and getting drunk from the office fridge filled with beer.
- One employee in higher management who was perpetually "home sick" allegedly had health issues, but I soon learned those health issues often involved being hungover from drinking until 5am. One time I came along. I showed up on time the next morning, despite two hours of sleep. HR asked what had happened the last night. I told the truth. Only to be reprimanded when that employee came in hungover at 2pm and was furious to learn that I hadn't covered up for them.
- Underqualified employees. Software developers were very talented. Management and social media team were wildly incompetent. They seemed to have no qualifications to do their job, and were highly resistant to learning even the most simple software. They would waste weeks of developers' time demanding that they develop special tools to make it easier for them to manage web content. At some point I developed a system for them to use, through the same software the rest of the office used, and they simply refused to even try it. They managed tickets in Excel spreadsheets because they thought ticketing software was too complicated. I was amazed upper management allowed that to continue.
- The social media team could've been replaced by a single competent person, they did so little work. Anytime I'd try to do some work for them because I was bored out of my mind and I knew it would take them days, I'd get reprimanded because that's "their job", not mine.
- Because a lot of people were more interested in partying and getting drunk with the CEO at lunchtime than work, I once sat in the office for a week, listening to an audiobook, pretending to work. Nobody noticed. I couldn't get actual work done because all my projects were awaiting input from others, who were too busy doing... nothing in particular from what I could see. Since they didn't want me to 'undermine' others by doing their work for them, and since they didn't want me to "take on too many projects", I just sat there doing nothing.
- Stealing work / plagiarism! One employee had allegedly been working on a project for 6 months. I was working on something similar, and got it done in a week. He asked me for a copy, just two days before his big project was due. When he presented his big project, I was shocked to see it was MY work, with no more than 1% added. No credit given. When I protested, I was told we're supposed to work as a team, so I should be happy my work was useful to him. NO IDEA what he'd spent those six months doing.
By far the most unprofessional work environment I've ever seen.
