I spent over 4 years working at 3M. I was hired as a software graduate but the company didn't seem to know how to turn a graduate into a software programmer. I had major impostor syndrome and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find a job anywhere else. I found my time there to be a truly spirit crushing experience. I worked on a variety of projects, many experimental. I had the experience of attending meetings with people who knew a project was due to be scrapped and would lie to you about it (to this day, I still don't understand why). Consequence was that I would continue to work on something pointless instead of re-directing my time elsewhere. Various cost-cutting measures introduced with false economies. I found that I suddenly had to do random administrative tasks that had previously been handled by a corporate team. My requests for help from that team were rebuffed (no performance appraisal benefit in them helping me). General technical incompetence. I witnessed a middle manager overseeing a team of well paid engineers ask why the data in a relational database couldn't all be stored in one table. Corporate IT asked me to share my password with them in order to fix something on my computer. An ideal environment for corporate psychopaths and self promoters. In my first week I attended a presentation by senior employees about career management. The advice was "manage your manager". This turned out to be true. People who spent time promoting themselves to their managers seemed to do a lot better than those who just kept their heads down, worked hard and delivered results. I saw a beautiful house of cards get built, the builder promote someone else into looking after it before taking the credit and moving on, leaving a live hand grenade behind. Parent company in the US seemed to keep appointing a new MD. Depending on what the current numbers were like the corporate strategy alternated between "get rid of people to get costs down" and "boost R&D spending to increase the share of revenue coming from new products". After a round of redundancies where mid-level technical staff were let go because "R&D efforts weren't in line with corporate strategy" but none of the technical leaders were let go, despite "wasting" resource on the very same thing, I decided to deal with my anxiety and just leave.
