Around three weeks ago, I got my first full-time job as a Junior Project Manager at a start-up/fully remote software development company after graduation. I have a master's in Urban and Regional Planning and experience in management positions. During the hiring process, I had told my employer that I did not know this job yet, I am a fast learner. He said it was fine.
As you can imagine, a fully remote 1,5 years old start-up is not even close to being well-organized. It still does not have human resources, people & culture, or any department that works with employees one-to-one to train or onboard them. It has only engineers, QA testers, and project managers, primarily juniors like me. The documents, templates, standardized processes, and anything that can create a coherent brand identity is just a hot mess that one needs a map to navigate on the company's cloud system. Also, the company does not have a proper orientation or an onboarding system. The PM team assigned me a “buddy,” an old PM, to help me navigate the work. We did not even talk with my buddy during my first week as they were on sick leave due to COVID-19. During my second week, we spoke only once at the end of the week as they were catching up with the work they could not do while they had the coronavirus. I completed online PM courses, went through projects, documents, and anything I could find as much as possible on the company's cloud system. I also reorganized the company's cloud system documents a little bit as I honestly got lost in that mess. Also, whenever my employer talked to me during these first days, he asked me to create a flow chart for the hiring and training process. I have never done it because I was not hired to work as an HR specialist, and there is no such department, a person working for this sort of duties, or any standard procedures to improve. Thus, I kept trying my best to get ready for my job as Jr. PM.
By the end of my third week, my employer took a software developer and me into a five-minute online meeting and told us that we needed to prepare a presentation for an unexpected client. Please note that until this point, I have never been in a meeting where my company made an offer to a potential client, never came across an example of such a presentation, or have never seen a template that the company uses. Our employer also told us that this developer in the meeting, who is a year old at the company, should have a template we can use. After saying this pretty vague information, the employer drops the call before letting us process or ask anything. My teammate shares a PowerPoint slide with me, which has only jpeg images created in photoshop and pasted on the slides as an image. Thus, I could not play with this template as they were all nothing but .jpeg images copy+pasted there. We imitated this presentation as much as we could on PowerPoint. I showed this presentation I created by imitating the old one to five employees to have their feedback. They all gave me the green light with minor changes. So, we sent it to our employer. Our employer took me into another online meeting with this developer I was working with, told us that our work was “garbage,” and we had to do it again in two hours. He did not say anything else or, let us ask, dropped the call after insulting us.
This other developer and I started to ask around. One of the old employees mentioned a template they used before. So this time, we used this template only they had. We changed the design in two hours, sent it again to our employer. Our employer, again, told us that it was garbage, we did not know anything, it was not the template he wanted us to use, and we would never work in a big company because we could not even have a standard presentation. Again, I am a Junior, and I have no ideas about this supposedly standard template. As he insults us more and more, I start feeling anxious, and at that point, I am only trying to keep calm to not to have a panic attack. We go back to our company's cloud system again, trying to find another presentation template, but there is no luck. Finally, after chatting with ten different employees, we found another recent template under the design file of a specific project offer's main file. It was not in any template folder, under the “How To” files, onboarding files, etc. It was in a specific project file.
Our employer reached out to me this time before we started doing the presentation for the third time. We started having another online meeting. He asked me to share my screen, and I did so. At some point, he asked me to take a screenshot of something. I used the snipping tool, and he got so mad, so angry. He told me that I do not know how to use a computer and just kept hissing as if he was tired of me because I used a snipping tool to take a screenshot of a part of my screen. He said I should use keyboard shortcuts and started to share his screen. He tried a combination of a keyboard, failed. He tried a second combination, failed. He tried a third combination, failed, and searched Google to find the right combination. He opened up an article and says there are nine different ways to do it. He started to read the first way of taking a screenshot, and it was a snipping tool. He went the second way, found the right combination for the keyboard, and took a screenshot by using this keyboard combination. After spending around five minutes on the task I did in five seconds, he asks, “Did you see how efficient it was to use the keyboard?” The bullying and insults went like this for a while. I felt like a seven-year-old child at the kitchen table trying to see her homework behind her watery eyes as her father was yelling at her to do this math problem right, although she does not know how to. I accept, at this point, I started to do dumb stuff as it was hard even to keep the mouse properly, and I was only waiting for this insult to end.
He gets me into a call again on the next business day, this time with someone from the design team who happens to be another junior employee. We start creating a new PowerPoint slide master in the morning. Our employer repeatedly checks on us and tells us it is only garbage. He says, “use the fonts and colors on this design account we have.” We do so. And then it turns out that it is not what he wants. He says we had to use another font and color palette from another presentation. It is the second day, maybe the sixth time he told us what garbage we made. And then said he would use the old template in that specific project's file that we did not even know or had the template. At the end of the day, he takes us into another online meeting with three people from the design team telling us that I suck at design; remember, I am a Junior Project Manager who has never seen an example of this so-called standard presentation. He pulls out the first PowerPoint presentation where we tried to imitate the photoshop presentation and shows the details he hates to prove how incompetent I am in design. And to be honest, I have no idea about design, his all-over-the-place brand identity, or his expectations. He continues by telling the design team how they are all terrorizing his brand and drops off the call.
Also, I live in a Middle Eastern country and make my salary in my home country's currency, while the company shows itself as a Zurich-based company since this employer/founder lives there. Yet, the rest of the employees live in this Middle Eastern country's different cities, and some are in close-by third-world countries. The company is making around a couple of million US dollars and paying its employees in a currency that the exchange rate is 1 USD against 15 our currency. To be more specific, my salary is 470 USD per month, although this company is working with only US and EU-based clients. To add one more detail, there is a high turnover rate at this company. Since I started, he fired four employees and hired five new ones in the span of three weeks. And I was told by the others it has been like this for a while. At this point, I am not sure if I should bite the bullet and keep this job, take the insults and just become better at design as a Jr. PM who still has not had the chance even to assist project management? Is the first professional job experience always like this? Should I stay, or should I go?