I would have replaced 'environment' with "prison" for literary effect. But well said nonetheless. Spot on.
I am in a panopticon open-office currently and it is really bad. People shooting nerf darts all the time (one hit me in the eye when I stood up, luckily I wear glasses). People are exceptionally loud. Yesterday the guy in the half-cube next to me was blasting reggae music for 3 hours even after I said "no one wants to hear that". Last Friday our dispatch manager was walking around all the cubes for 2 hours talking as loud as she could because she just got back from vacation. So I told her "Can you stop talking so loudly? I can't concentrate on my work." Her response: "You just started here what 2 weeks ago?" As if that somehow justified being a huge distraction, ok, I am the bad guy cause I don't want to hear you basically shout for hours on end, sure. Then I got asked by my boss if I said all the women in the office are loud. Then I overheard her complaining to another manager, about being told she was being too loud (talking loudly so everyone in the office can hear). They were essentially indirectly taking a jab at me. It is just petty office garbage and totally unprofessional.
I have already started looking at other companies and I've only been here 3 weeks.
That said, I hope your luck turns and something better works out.
Plus, there is no clear direction on what my job role exactly is. I was told project engineer, then I was told Level III Engineer, then I was told I am Level III inside a 3-tiered system, being the level 3 of level 2? All within the span of the last week and a half. It is very off-putting and awkward.
The one perk is that I am salaried non-exempt, so I get paid for overtime. But it is just so disorganized and there seems to be a lot of weird politics going on.
I really don't like most of the team here except for my director. There is only one or two guys who are mature, everyone else acts like they're 15 (the nerf gun shooting, yelling).
I also have basically no control over anything network related or back-end stuff, which is super frustrating because there is so much inefficiency going on it's insane. They haven't automated anything here.
There is so much wrong, it's hard to synthesize it all in one post. But a quick example is that we have literally no automation in place, so level 1 and 2 techs are setting up workstations manually... It's 2017... I mean really?
I am getting micromanaged over stupid little things too by a manager who is not even my direct manager. It is just frustrating.
Oh one more thing, we have a 9:30 "huddle" every morning with the ops team (like 10 guys + manager [not my direct manager]) and we have to say what we're working on, if we're stuck on anything, and what our plan is for the day. Then they read this little quote that is submitted by at least one engineer into a box and we have to guess who it is. It is ultra, ultra cringe inducing and super weird. I've never been in a company that does this. It makes me feel like I work in a daycare.
Sometimes these are empty, designed to create the appearance of an all seeing eye without having the overhead of storing data, wiring, etc.