Where to start? Future..... for a company called Future, it's odd how many people want to make it their past. Future's last big acquisition was Dennis Publishing. At the time, we were told they wanted to acquire the expertise Dennis had in subscriptions marketing etc. But within a few months, every single senior manager from Dennis had gone (along with some senior editors). I don't know why, but the fact that managers at Future have almost no decision-making power might have been a part of it. Managers get told what to do; then challenged about how they did it. Maybe that is not rewarding work for ambitious, intelligent, creative people. Look at the reviews here, and there are so many complaints about how no one gets to do anything without permission from the highest level; and often they seem scared to ask. Why would that be?
Also, for a company called Future, some of its systems are ancient. Almost every week, there is a message from IT about a system disruption. It just makes everything more difficult and grinds you down.
At Future, the bottom line is everything. Forget about expenses! If they absolutely have to, they will put you up in a cheap hotel. But if a manager wants to buy their team a drink, it will have to come out of their pocket. That's a bit sad, but what is really frustrating is that they don't invest properly in central services; so rather than pay for enough HR people, or accounts people, they get teams to do as much of their own HR work, invoice processing, etc, on top of their actual job. If you have to get help from HR - or People & Culture as its called - you'll wish you didnt. They barely respond to emails. (Though I see P&C finds time to post responses here, and also - I would guess, from the tone of some of them - to write a fair few bogus positive reviews too.)
The CEO likes to say that at Future, decisions get made fast. Yeah, maybe if you have some great money making (or money saving) scheme, it will happen fast. They do have some good departments, who get stuff done. But if you want something to happen that is not about making or saving money, you'll be swimming in treacle.
Future is not an evil corporation. People get by; maybe some Wolf of Wall Street types even thrive here. But there is no joy in it. It's mean-spirited and corporate and faceless. The CEO writes upbeat friendly sounding emails to all staff every week, but they give a completely misleading sense of what the day to day reality of working here is like. It's not a nice place to work.
