After a few great interviews and conversations, I was hired and sold on the idea of being proactive on the data analysis end to help identify new markets of growth for the company. Instead, I ended up performing many menial, personnel-focused micromanaging tasks, like a high-powered wet-vac someone rents to clean up all the debris that’s stuck in the carpet. The training started off well but quickly became fractured, disorganized, and incomplete. (I should have seen this coming, as I wasn’t provided a job description until 3 weeks after starting.) In training, FareHarbor sells you on the fact that it is an open, transparent work environment where feedback is encouraged and rewarded. As I quickly learned, providing feedback to improve workflow, to efficiently allocate resources, or to seek clarification of objectives is not encouraged if you’re looking up the ladder. As one reviewer said quite accurately, this company values processes over personnel. I had received positive, exceptional feedback through all aspects of employment up to and through the day of termination (no HR present.) I was not given an objective reason for dismissal, and had completed all priority tasks, developed an open, previously non-existent rapport with adjacent teams, and delivered at pace. Essentially, I was given the “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup speech and was blindsided.
In Europe, FareHarbor is scaling quickly and the manpower cannot keep up, which means many of the roles are undefined and bleed into each other in the developmental and operational departments. There are many incongruencies between team missions, individual goals, and managerial expectations. New product and software updates, as well as best practices amendments, are constant and difficult to keep track of which can and does overwhelm veterans and trainees across all departments. The result is mass confusion about daily tasks and the inability to manage workflow without micromanagement. This makes task prioritization a very fluid and dynamic process and can change quite quickly as it comes down the “chain of command” like a game of telephone. (There were more than 4 occasions where my team leader assigned tasks that I dedicated significant time to complete, that ended up being scrapped entirely, or had been incorrectly assessed to be initiated by the team leader in the first place. There was no ownership on their end, and this kind of redundancy and miscommunication was commonplace.) Cumulatively, there is very low management experience at FareHarbor, which can in part be attributed to the extremely high turnover rate. Many of the employees are Americans who moved over with the company last year, sans family or friends to keep them busy beyond work, thus work becomes the entire focus of their time (7:15 AM emails and 9:00 PM Slack messages, anyone?) On the technical side, new customers are promised dedicated account managers, but there aren’t enough to provide them, and many have zero experience in the field. The salespeople (or account executives, as FareHarbor calls them) are poorly compensated for the amount of work they put in, as the American sales model that was grafted on to the European market has failed to take hold.
