Pros
- Amazing colleagues. I have never worked anywhere else with such a high percentage of people that I genuinely liked and admired, and such a low (often zero!) percentage of people that I disliked. Even the senior management team are for the most part good people, in my opinion, which only makes the way they're running the company now even more confusing, frustrating, and upsetting. - Occasional fairy godmother moments still show glimpses of the company at its most human and exceptional. Notably this included the offer of untracked, judgement-free time off at short notice during the first few weeks of the first lockdown last year, followed by giving everybody every other Friday off (at full pay) from then on.
Cons
- About two years ago, the company underwent a brutally intentional shift from having a very flat, co-operative/collaborative structure, to a very stratified hierarchical structure - with an unusually wide (and still-widening) gap between the 10 or so people who get to make decisions, and everybody else. This is being presented as "professionalisation". - The stratification seems to have triggered and amplified the organisation's occasional tendency to degenerate into pursuing easily-quantified short-term targets (clicks! donations!) rather than pursuing its actual mission. - Failure to recruit fast enough to compensate for the always high (and now accelerating) turnover has obviously caused understaffing, and has very noticeably increased workloads for people at almost every level of the organisation - resulting in even higher turnover. People are now quitting without even finding another job first. - Relatedly; a significant number of people are visibly not well (mental health stuff, to an extent that takes a physical toll) by the time they finish working their notice.