All of the supervisors and experienced researchers have a different way of doing things and it's impossible to get a clear understanding of how to do things - I regularly got told I was wrong for doing things the way I was literally trained to do by others. They are great people at that office and a pleasure to work with, but I was constantly frustrated with the lack of consistency and insane expectations from upper management. They prefer quantity over quality but it's impossible to know where to sacrifice quality without being told you're doing things wrong and affecting your error rate, which is a metric of performance. Top performers regularly did things I was told are incorrect, yet they received praise for the amount of requests they could handle. It seemed to me like the most successful researchers had either been there forever and knews all the ins and outs of the processes, or figured out how to cut corners without getting in trouble and pumped out requests without actually doing them correctly. Their expectations for new researchers were absolutely delusional. They say it takes a year to actually fully understand the job yet after 4 months you are considered a seasoned employee and compared to others who have been there for years. Even after I'd been there a year there was still so much conflicting info and specific exceptions to rules that it was impossible to know how to do things right. The job was advertised as opportunities for advancement, but the only people who had been promoted even just to senior researcher had been there for over 3 years. I believe supervisors had been there for 10 years plus. There were many researchers ahead in the line for promotion, so I could tell I wasn't getting promoted anytime in the next few years. The American head office seems to be gutting the Canadian office and outsourcing managment to the states. They booked a team meeting on Canada day because they don't even pay attention to our holidays, and gave us different days off for observed Christmas and Chrsitmas Eve that didn't line up with anyone else I know. My career there ended in a mass layoff of 25 researchers, out of an office of like 50. They increased their office by almost double over the course of a year then cut it in half in one layoff. They were still hiring up to 4 months before the layoff. Apparently they didn't even tell the supervisors they were about to lose half of their staff unexpectedly. I would say, if you're the type of person who cares about the quality of your work and needs well-structured expectations, this is not the place for you. If you're just looking to get a paycheck and aren't frustrated by confusing processes or impossible expectations, it could be a good setup for you.
