A long, strange summer
The worst part of being unemployed, other than constant financial worry, is interacting with numerous individuals who don’t give a shit about doing their job well, let alone anywhere close to properly. I could stereotype and say that government employees are the worst of all, as it takes a serious fuckup to be disciplined and/or put on a track to be fired, but no—it’s pretty universal that neutrality is gone in the workforce, and people are split between simply going through the motions and wild enthusiasm. For those in Gen Z following along, a quick reminder that “quiet quitting” isn’t a thing that you invented. See “apathy” in any dictionary. Moving on…
Earlier this year, I worked for a shitty company called Neogen.*
*I can say whatever I want because not only is it all true, but on top of that, I didn’t sign their pathetic, highly limiting severance agreement.
Neogen is one of those companies that comes up with a patentable idea, runs with it for a bit, then fails to invent anything else and instead starts acquiring other small companies to build a following. Somehow, they rode a pseudo-folksy approach (“I’m just a fruit farmer”—the CEO, multiple times in staff meetings) and amassed $1 billion USD to throw at 3M in 2022, resulting in the acquisition of 3M’s existing food safety catalog. I was hired by 3M as part of the deal, as the long-time holder of my position retired before the transition was finalized, and the agreement was drawn up with this position intact. I was told that the position would focus on getting Neogen’s new content management system up and running with their content and all the legacy 3M content coming over in the acquisition, with an eventual massive rebranding. It sounded like interesting work, and Neogen promised a substantial retention bonus to each 3M employee coming over in 1-on-1 meetings held before the official transition date. For a while, we each had two laptops, two separate email addresses, and some overlapping meetings. The 3M Food Safety team was so frustrated within a month or two of the transition (as Neogen was still doing things in their small-time ways, nothing close to what an international corporation like 3M would do) that leadership hired a “transition consultant” who addressed us from his kitchen in Hawaii at 3:00 am his time, feeding and baby-talking his cat on camera while the rest of us watched and he somehow didn’t notice. I digress, but that was some funny shit. The former 3Mers had a good point—Neogen wasn’t holding up their end of things and was completely unprepared to ingest hundreds of people with higher expectations than what was actually presented. I don’t know how many folks opted to leave before the retention bonus period was up, but I know it certainly wasn’t zero.
I came over to Neogen expecting decisions to have been made and an implementation to have been planned. There was no one in a similar role for me to look to for advice, as that’s all that leadership offered (literally, “find someone with your job title and make a new friend”). I kept asking questions, because I was fucking bored despite the money being the most I’d ever made in my career. Things unraveled when I discovered that Neogen hadn’t even committed to a content management system by the time of the transition. While they shopped around and met with potential providers, I was left completely out of the loop until they chose one. Meanwhile, everyone muddled along with SharePoint and serious version control issues, in addition to sales staff who would randomly rename assets because they didn’t like the original file names, so there were three or four copies of the same file in different folders. On top of that, another sales genius decided he wanted folders named one way (product lines), while another wanted a different naming convention (by organism). Duplication, party of too many, your table is ready. It wasn’t until fucking January 2023 that I had what I’d call “real” work to do. Only, get this—I was the one asked to design the taxonomy. The whole-ass thing.
It’s good that, once upon a time, I was 21 and considering an MLS degree from Rutgers. I couldn’t afford it, though, so I just got a job and winged it from there. Fast forward 25 years later, and I managed to do it all from scratch, and well enough that the vendor-side folks leading the implementation complimented me with “Most people just aren’t this far along at this point.” My only obstacle was that Neogen was full of internal disagreements about what their own products were even called and where they fell within the taxonomy. The EMEA group (later “iEMEA,” like some kind of Apple product) would just make up names, it seemed like, then be unable to tell me what types of products they were. No one had taken the time to properly learn where Neogen’s products belonged, even with the terrible breadcrumbs on the official Neogen website. The USAC group had somewhat better of a handle on internal taxonomy, but constantly pushed back with comments like, “Well, that’s not what I would call it.” I used my overlord privileges in the system and made user groups, built and modified the taxonomy through several clunky user interface changes by the vendor, and wound up being the go-between with the sales enablement vendor’s technical team when the two systems weren’t playing nice with each other. It was A Lot, and it was Far More Than I Signed Up For—so when the time came to launch the system to the entire company, I told the project manager (who had become my de facto boss—my manager and I really didn’t meet much at the time, and he was dealing with his own administrative nightmares as a new employee himself) that the long-term goals of the position were out of my technical reach and I had neither the aptitude nor the desire to continue. I was actively proofreading a bunch of assets at the same time as having to train international teams on the content management system (note to Neogen: you still have way too many typos in your shit), but I actually enjoyed the editorial work and saw a future there, so I leaned on my manager and shifted my focus to his team and also began covering creative workflow coordination because of an employee’s impending maternity leave.
I was told the maternity coverage would transition to a full-time position after the maternity leave ended.
Then a wild new Director of Marketing appeared, and we were shifted under her instead of our existing big boss in Operations, with no notice.
The Director of Marketing insisted on having 1-on-1s with all of us. I could smell the bullshit being cooked, but I hadn’t found another job yet and couldn’t escape.
She lied when asked about whether layoffs would take place. Just a month later, oops, a reorganization—and I and three others were canned, including my manager. Three of the four of us were over 40, but speaking of other labor violations, Neogen was apparently already under investigation by the NLRB for threatening workers who wanted to unionize. Clearly they needed our salaries to fund their legal battle, which I hope they lose. It took Neogen’s incompetent IT department over a month to send two massively oversized boxes for me to use to return my laptop and docking station. I never received acknowledgment of their actual return, but whatever, that’s on UPS. I rejected the severance agreement because it stated that I couldn’t make any public “criticism” of the company, and frankly, to waive my right to free speech, my personal price is a metric fuckton higher than one pathetic paycheck. I filed for unemployment and, as things shook out, I was able to hit them for the full roughly three months of payments, which was 25% more than the check they offered.
After numerous rejections without even a screening (including twice being an internal reference), one blatant box-checking interview (again, an internal reference), several fruitless first and second interviews where I was ghosted and/or rejected, a HireVue video-only interview with typos in the question prompts (state university hiring, sigh), and one multi-part phone call, video, proofreading, copy writing, and IQ/”personality” testing experience later (the team “decided to go in a different direction”), I had a perfectly normal two-part video interview in which my experience spoke for itself and I agonized every day that passed without hearing from the recruiter… until I got a call from a higher-up in HR offering me the position. It’s an upgrade in every possible way from what I had at Neogen.
Moral of the story: Don’t let a job at a shitty company define your worth.
Bonus moral of the story: Don’t buy stock in a shitty company when the CEO suggests it over and over when asked why employee compensation is so far below the market rates.
