Enjoyable Work Environment - Office Manager Primate Labs Employee Review

It was close to my house

Got yelled at by the founder and I was not the only one. He called me into his office, closed the door and started yelling at me while I was standing in front of him and he was seated in his chair. The entire office heard regardless of the door being closed because of how loud he was. There is no HR at this company and the people who work there do not value their worth enough to understand an extremely toxic work environment when they see one. I was there for only two weeks in 2019 as an intern before I got yelled at and found an internship elsewhere the week after. On my first day, the founder made a joke about having a plush toy as HR which was the first red flag. There was no proper on-boarding process and direction to what you’re suppose to be doing which is important specially as an intern. The day before I got yelled at, the founder yelled at another developer and everyone in the office just looked at each other. I was in a state of shock at what I had witnessed and tried comforting the developer after he came out of the founder’s office and advised him to report it to our university’s co-op advisor but since he was a first year intern he didn’t want to raise it as it might create an issue. This happened to me almost 5 years ago now and it’s taken me until now to post this on here because of the trauma it had caused me. I had really good managers from my previous internships who validated that what I experienced at this company should not be allowed and also connected with another student who had previously interned here and said that she experienced the same thing. PLEASE do not stoop so low to accept this level of harassment and humiliation to be your work environment and DO NOT accept any form of job offer from this company.

Work is interesting. Company deals with big players in tech. WLB is overall good.

Here are some things that may be of interest to you that I experienced during my 3 months at Primate Labs: - CEO yelled at: - intern twice - new-grad twice (and fired them after ~2.5 months) - full timer twice - client once - and this is what I saw being in office only two days a week! - On top of the yelling, snide and sarcastic comments will be made when you make honest mistakes. - For most of my time, there was a 3:2 dev to intern ratio (excluding the CEO as dev). - When you make a mistake, the CEO will turn it into a public shaming session in the group chat under the guise that discussing the issue publicly is sharing knowledge. - You will not get non-statutory holidays off (eg. August Civic holiday) - The company seems to have extremely high turnover, at least based on the things I saw when I was there - Some status updates you provide will be ignored, leaving you guessing what to work on next (and you will get in trouble for guessing the wrong thing) If you are looking for full-time work, I can't recommend it. Working here felt like an ad-hoc group project with a group leader that goes out of their way to demoralize the members. If you are looking for an internship, it might be worth it, just be aware that your term will likely not be an enjoyable one. Lastly, I suspect some (perhaps all) of the positive reviews on this page are not legitimate. At the time of writing this, there is a Software qa analyst review from July 16th, 2024. I worked here at that time, and there was no such employee. Best of luck with your job hunt.