Pros
You get to wear jeans, 1 hour off for lunch, your own desk, small company so you honestly know everyone.When TaCito says “customer comes first”, he 100% means it—even at the expense of his employees well/being. At FIRST, the CEO is great, an intelligent man who loves his community and does charity for children.
Cons
So, before I accepted the offer I read these reviews—I found them concerning but I ignored the gut feeling. I should have listened. For starters, I stated up front that I have a specific math-based specialty (and I enjoyed being creative but not as a career), I value home-life balance, and a structured working environment; they ultimately did not bring any of those despite agreeing that they did. The normal day is from 9AM- 6PM, I would often get to leave around 7:30- each day working in the report. There wasn’t a structure—there were the CEO and president who told you a list of jobs —wouldn’t prioritize/give deadlines/any specification they wanted but you had to guess correct because honestly you would be cursed out anyway. ..because both the CEO/owner and the president will curse you out. The President will make editing personal. Instead of saying “fix it because blah” he will chastise & lecture you how you are incompetent and stupid for making a mistake. He sees making mistakes as you not understanding what he wants versus a beginners mistake—he will repeat “I’m not calling you stupid or insulting” but will out-right say it if you apologize. The work he asks of you is a priority and then...the CEO asks you do something simultaneously. No warning, no deadline. So if you work on one assignment with care the other (CEO or President) will insult you and ask why you haven’t finished the assignment he gave you. Also, you will be asked to edit the CEO’s random articles he decides to write. He ‘writes like he talks’ and apparently he talks like a small child; passive voice and grammatical errors off the wazoo. I have written IN MANY different contexts; from philosophical, exploratory, research, lab reports, Memorandums, Emergency Criterion for geology, Psychological, statistical, consulting reports—and my mother was an English teacher; I have had my fair share of editing and being edited. While editing his articles, I did not make his mistakes personal. I understand that no one writes a perfect first draft—- and my role, as an editor, focuses on the writing—- not the individual making the writing mistakes. As an editor, I provided solutions/examples on how he could rewrite some stuff and fix certain logic jumps present in his draft. Unfortunately, my logic/grammatical/syntactical corrections weren’t really chosen because they didn’t ‘sound like him...It’s often surprising because he went to Harvard business school, boulder, and SMU which always made me wondered how he survived writing as he did. Helping the CEO with personal projects also got me in trouble with the President and IT director —so I essentially wasted my time seeing that he didn’t take any of my suggestions. Ultimately, editing the article without making mistakes personal made the interaction with the President so much worse. There are two individuals making up the IT department. There is the director who honestly should be paid more and represent more of a software architect. Both President and CEO curse him out and complain of a coding project takes, to their standards, ‘too long’—-neither CEO or President have ever coded and do not possess realistic expectations of coding projects. If you try to explain to them, they get mad—-badger you with unrelated questions, and ultimately assume you don’t know why you’re doing because if they don’t comprehend what you’re doing—-you’re doing it wrong. There isn’t an HR department regarding complaints/other—so if you don’t like it...quit. My mental health was so bad that both my spouse and mother told me I should quit 2 weeks in and I worked there for 42 days because I tried to hold out. Referring back to acceptance of the Business Intelligence Analyst position, it’s important to note that I have a MS in Applied Statistics & Data Analytics—- so I believed the Business Analyst position would at least require me to do some analytical work—no. I did clerical work, input variable to a template and managed social media; so when I wasn’t an absolute pro within the first week the phrase ‘why did we hire you’ or ‘Writing reports is why we hired you’, and if I knew that straight up I wouldn’t have accepted the job because I know that formatting reports were the weakest skill in my graduate and undergraduate degree.
