Posting here for anyone with any corporate or publishing experience. I recently finished an internship in my dream industry– publishing. I loved every minute of it–even the boring stuff. However, this company was very siloed and isolating and the vibe was extremely stiff and cold. I always felt weirdly on edge and the people on my team were hard to read. People didn’t really seem to come into the office a lot and I was usually all alone. By the end, I got some tea about the culture and was clued in on recent soft firings/retirements and one abusive boss at the top. I chatted the nicest person on this team in the elevator who everyone loved and called a “protector and advocate” and asked what she did over a holiday and she said she was thankful to be “anywhere but here.”
HR asked me I’d be willing to work there full-time however some weird things happened. My boss was super busy and I had to chase her down. Other people asked about my lack of communication with her even though she ignored my emails, gave me short one-word responses in our meetings, said in a presentation she doesn’t like people and ran away from me when I tried to say hello or check in or ignored me when I walked up to talk to her during office social events lol. Weirdly she was very social and funny/outgoing with other people on the team. There was also a weird situation where she asked me to do something and called me out in a meeting about not knowing some code for a project and I told her I’d been left off an email and she asked other people to stay on the call after but never followed up with me about it or other emails where people gave me conflicting information. I started to wonder if it was disorganized or I was maybe being set up to look bad bc she didn’t think I was a good fit somehow.
Even though I got some bad vibes from that office and the team, I still wonder if I should try again and apply. I couldn’t tell if everyone hated me or I was anxious about working at a big name company like this. Am I overthinking and could this just be paranoia and anxiety? Is corporate just uncomfortable? Should I try my luck and apply to work on a different team?