Pros
Exposure to talented global craftspeople.
Cons
This role was, for me, a dream position. Unfortunately, within days of working hand-in-hand with VAWAA's founder (my manager), I couldn’t help but feel that her chosen management style was nothing short of abuse, harassment, and bullying. Since week one I was subjected to behavior that felt incredibly insulting: she berated me in our private conversations, refused to answer questions or provide any support, insisted on multiple daily quizzes which turned into hour-long open-fires. It felt like being on trial. I felt like I was being treated as a criminal. She demanded I log every second of our regularly 12-hour workdays, and would frequently comb through my timesheet to ask me if it had really taken me "23 minutes to send these two emails," or what I had been doing. If I didn't respond to a message within 3 minutes she would ask me if I had left in the middle of the day. If I asked a question about something I had never done before in the backend of our website, she would reply with a question mark or a shocked emoji rather than helping me, a new employee, find an answer. She would spontaneously suggest co-working days where I was forced to show my face on camera for 10 hours straight, through lunch, and receive unsolicited tips on my posture. She would suggest we have meetings over lunch, attack me with constant questions while eating in front of me, and then say "you didn't even eat your lunch," before giving me a list of things to get started on. She asked that I copy her on all of my emails, which I was happy to do, but she would reply with agitated critique, often in all caps, to every single thing I sent out.
This position was listed as fully remote, and yet I was forced to travel to New York and pay for my own stay for weeks. The co-working space the founder so kindly reminded me she was paying for was significantly uncomfortable, with slanting floors and little air conditioning in a heat wave. Moreover, we did very little in-person onboarding and nothing that could not have been done remotely. I also lost the majority of my first paycheck paying for an apartment nearby. It further made me feel as though I was not to be trusted and could never do anything right as the goalposts kept shifting.
Though I would start early and stay late every single day, she never gave any praise and continued to bring me to tears on a daily basis with her aggressive and belittling communication style. After months of this my mental and physical health began to suffer. I reached out to other former employees, of which there are plenty, who all told me they had suffered lasting psychological damage at her hand and mimicked my experience word for word. At which point I decided to resign.
It has the potential to be an amazing company. Unfortunately, unless the founder changes her management style, I don't see how she'll be able to keep anyone on long enough to build the team she needs to help it grow.
