Hello everybody,I’m Brazilian and worked for Alexander Proudfoot Brazil as an Installation Consultant for a very short time (thankfully). At first, it just looked like a normal consultancy company but very soon I found out it was exactly what most of the people’s reviews you may found on internet say - even though I was hired by their São Paulo/Brazil office, what makes me think they’re pretty all the same globally.Salary was reasonable to low but I decided to give it a try. During the recruitment process I realized that some of the upper management members were those typical calculated, selfish and cold-blooded executives – but well, once again I thought “let’s give it a try”.On my first day I started to see what they really are: even though they are supposed to give clients efficient management solutions, internally they are a real mess. The project started without a manager and solutions sold to the client were just impossible to be achieved in such a short period of time.But my first real disappointment was when I was “proposed” a working shift of at least 13 hours – starting at 7am and finishing at 8pm. The proposal came exactly like this from the manager, who had just joined the team “what do you think if we TRY to leave the client’s facility every day at 8pm?”. I was shocked when I realized that the plan was to have a 13 hour shift as NORMAL and that “overtime” would only be considered after that crazy shift of 13 hours were completed. I complained about it and proposed a new shift (a 12 hour one!), but was considered a rebel. At first I tried to talk to management individually but pretty soon they were talking to me about the issue in front of the rest of the team (then I started to realize that this behavior was quite usual – management members used to argue and fight among themselves in front of all of us and even quite confidential internal issues related to the company and client were usually discussed in front of the team). During one of the discussions about the shift duration I asked if overtime was going to be paid – that was my first project and the issue had never come up, not even during the recruitment process. They looked at me with as if I was telling a joke. Needless to say I just had made some enemies.The client’s facility had a restaurant so soon I was also able to find out that we all had to eat in a real hurry – since upper management members were always with us we couldn’t even have a proper lunch break. They used to swallow the food down in a couple of minutes, putting a lot of pressure on us to finish quickly. Average lunch break was of 15 minutes. During lunch break work related topics were always brought by the manager and/or director, so lunch breaks turned into meetings quite often. Besides that, team members just couldn’t go anywhere (like the toilette) without being asked “where did you go?” when they were back. Once I was caught coming back from a quick chat with a client employee without my notebook in hands. I’ve been told then “Don’t do that again… It’s a ‘proudfootian’ habit that we must not go around the client’s facility without our notebook in hands. We look more productive that way”. I was also not allowed to speak directly with many of the client employees – in case I needed to speak with those specific people, most of them from the upper management team, I would have project’s manager or director go with me. There was even a “communication matrix” hung in our project room, specifying with whom the team members were allowed to have conversations with. I must also mention some tasks that should not be done during our working shift, as a report with all the tasks that had been executed in the previous week. Summing up, they just don’t care about people, they see and treat you like trash and are not even afraid to disguise it.If you love yourself and care about your well-being keep away from them.PROS: 1. Some of the management members seem to know a lot about management consulting, so, despite all mentioned above, you may end up learning some good stuff2. If you’re an unhappy person and don’t want to think about it and realized that being a selfish workaholic may not leave you time to think about who you really are and what you want for your life, this is for you3. You may end up knowing what you DON’T want for your lifeCONS:1. Do I need to say more?
