... somethings about Slyce.
I was a former employee at the New Waterford cite in Nova Scotia. To start-off, I breifly heard about the company in the news paper back in April 2014. They were looking for "someone who likes to get stuff done", can "think critically", and "doesn't mind hardwork as long as you're having fun".
It was suspcious to me, but I heard it was a tech company-- so I was curious. They had a meet-n-greet towards the end of april, and somehow I managed to get hired. They vaguely told us that they integrate in apps, and that they "believe we're the next big thing", and hiring for "Data Specialists".
So, great. I get the job, may 21st 2014 rolls around. We're all stuffed in side a cramped training class from the old Spiegal owners. We're told that "Slyce likes to help the community", and that we should all break off into groups and do things. We did things like pick up garbage, gave flowers to people, took animals for a walk, you name it. We did this for... well, one or two days.
Everything seems pretty lax at the moment. We're getting paid, we can't start real work yet since the PCs hadn't arrived, and the "happy, open, friendly" environment was great! Some people had their suspicions-- even I did, but a good job with a decent wage is all I cared about.
Fast-forward two weeks, the PCs arrive. We start tagging images (think google search the game) from the training program to get us "ready" for the big thing. Now I took my time with alot of this, but the next day, things got strangely hard-core. We started having to have 90% accuracy on our images, and tagging a minimum of 500 training images a day (which isn't as bad as it sounds, but why training images were taken so seriously made no sense)
I should mention, every single day we came in we had to do a "how was your day" thing called "My BIG life" where you talked about personal things about your day. What we didn't know is that these were recorded, by our team leads, WORD FOR WORD and then sent to one of the manangers. So if you said something like "Man, I hate night shift", you'd get pulled into a room hours later and SCREAMED at until you said "I love my job".
It was a cult the entire time we worked there. When it went live in oct 2014 for Neiman Marcus, we barely even got live images--most of the time they were from investors, so we had to tag them as perfect as we can. which i understood.. despite this, they would have "Training scripts" running constantly, so we could hit our "500 tags a day" thing, which was apparently super important.
At the end of each week, we'd have to fill out "15 5s", which were basically 4 questions we had to answer about the company... with your name tied to it. Initially we were told "don't worry, just speak your mind", but their were rumors about people losing their jobs for doing so.
What were the questions? "How are you feeling", "Is there anything you're currently struggling with?", "How would you improve Slyce", and additional thoughts.
Now, if you said ANYTHING like "I'm curious as to know when this will be automated", or "I struggle tagging home depot", you'd be immediately singled out, blamed, and then told you were no longer eligable to be promoted, and then a snarky "How does that make you feel?" would be asked after.
I, personally, was accused of doing several things that I never did, and the managers would go behind my back, cut vacation hours, etc. And if I asked about why I was given 6 hours of vacation when someone else got 8 hours, I was told "No. Everyone got 6" (despite the fact I asked people in secret, and everyone but me seemed to have gotten 8. Not a big problem, but a clear sign of bias. I still have the e-mails and the voice recording I took when they took me into a room and falsely accused me of stuff I didn't do.
I got fired once I actually brought up the issues.
Anyway, I figured I'd let people know my experience with the company. It was bad. They routinely tell people who leave or get fired that "You're not allowed to say anything bad about this company for 5 years!", but at this point, it has to be said. They are not legit. I realize I'll get flac for posting this, but people deserve to know the truth.