Open creativity to disguise corporate bullying - Anonymous employee ROLI Employee Review

This is the worst job I've ever had, and the trauma of it was exaggerated by the relentless propaganda to pretend it was a place that valued quality work and a work/life balance. As is common at ROLI, I had 2-3 time consuming tasks and 3 interviews after my initial application to join the company. I was attracted by the claims of a warm community, a holistic outlook and the vision of democratising music. So it was a particular shock when it turned out to be the most cold hearted, inefficient, drudgery of corporate dishonesty I've ever experienced. When I left the company I spoke to another former employer who left after being hospitalised for exhaustion. I left when having to attend work bought me to tears in the morning and damaged my physical and mental wellbeing. The writing was on the wall when I heard from colleagues in my department that previous line managers had a reputation for bullying, I knew nothing would be done about mine, who deliberately set me up to fail. I believe this was because I reported stats and assessed all work honestly, which compromised their own deceptive practices. I worked 10-12 hour days, was exhausted and didn't have a life, but this was never enough. When I asked for support to make work more efficient management shirked this responsibility as a means of constantly shifting blame on to employees. I've excelled and pushed boundaries everywhere I've worked, but felt consistently undermined and crushed in my attempts here. I created a strategy as briefed and was told it was not good enough. Then asked for specific feedback and doubled the document and was belittled for it. The length of the strategy was doubled again and consumed entire weekends and was verified by other experts in the field. After this last rejection it became clear that my manager was inventing fickle reasons and contradicting their own arguments in order to sabotage this work. I'm known for engaging warmly with everyone, so when they said I didn't engage with other staff, I longer had any doubt they were just inventing lies. It confirmed my initial suspicions, after they refused to acknowledge me at all until I'd worked there for over two weeks. To summarise, I went in expecting to build creatively and left doing an endless quantity of admin I could never resolve. Essentially I didn't do the job I applied for (a common complaint at ROLI), and when I said I didn't have time for all the work, I was always made to feel pathetic for not matching the regular 4am starts to the work day my line manager did as standard. Some may be content with this burnout culture if it meant they achieved results. But I learnt that ROLI's products were always rushed, that advice from experts across the company constantly disregarded, and that there had been a long line of employees who had been chewed up and spat out after being seduced by a dishonest dream. Their attempt at a culture was really just a cult. Strangely enough there seemed to be pockets of workers who were content, some because their jobs were so specialist they were grateful for a job at all, and others who worked in more humane departments and saw some tangible output for their efforts. They pride themselves on discarding traditional management structures, which sadly just became a means to shift responsibility downwards on a subservient class of exhausted minions who stayed because of same vague association with a 'cool' job somewhere on the outer fringes of music culture. I expected emotional intelligence here but was met by bullshitting and pretension. I've never taken the time to post a negative review online in my life, but this experience left such a mark on me that I sincerely want to warn others so they don't enter with the same naivety as I did. If you work with the tech you'll be surrounded by nicer people, even if you'll be expected to overwork, but steer clear of other areas as your work may feel as pointless and soul destroying as mine.