Blue State Reviews

3.3

58% would recommend to a friend

(117 total reviews)

Joe Rospars

68% approve of CEO

45% positive business outlook

Blue State has an employee rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars, based on 117 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Blue State employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Media and communication industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

117 reviews
2.0
7 Apr 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Located in Soho/Tribeca. It used to be a fun, exciting environment before it got too big, too fast.

Cons

Ah where do I begin... I had such high hopes when I first started. It was small, scrappy, and cared about its employees and clients. Now, it's a big wishy washy digital agency with no focus, muddled vision and rather incompetent senior management. More specifically... -The hours and salary: they work you to the ground without decent pay. This used to be acceptable when we were working for interesting clients and supporting good causes. Not really the case anymore as the only thing senior management cares about now is the company's bottom line. Small budget clients are shunned for big, corporate clients that only care about how to sell sell sell through digital. Our quality of work has also deteriorated significantly because we don't have enough resources to devote fully and completely to meet our clients' needs. Our main goal has become to get things done fast and cheap. - People, behind their facade of niceties, are vicious, unfriendly, and try to one up each other ALL THE TIME. People are always fighting in meetings, and it's rather draining to try to work in such a tense, unproductive environment. Very unhealthy. - Development opportunities are slim and ambiguous. There isn't a clear path as to how you will grow and develop, and unfortunately, the management does not care. Your manager also won't care—they're not trained on how to manage and it's not prioritized in this company. They don't seem to realize managers can make or break your experience at a job. - The senior management is incompetent. It's one thing to be smart and another thing to be business savvy. The upper management is filled with friends of the CEO who have been promoted through questionable paths. I wouldn't complain about this if they were actually good at running the place, but they have absolutely no idea what they're doing. We grew too big too quickly without a plan for how to maintain that growth. We've expanded our "expertise" beyond our core areas and diluted our brand and services. The outlook for this place is rather grim, from what I've seen. The above reasons have pushed many employees, new and old, out. It's unfortunate it has come to this because it had a lot of potential.

2.0
15 Sept 2017

A Few Posters on the Wall Don't Make This a Progressive Company

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There are some really smart people here.

Cons

Run far, far away! The smart people at BSD are mostly left over from when this company was good ~4 years ago. Unfortunately most of them are stuck at below-market salaries working around a colossus of technical debt being micromanaged by senior execs. There is no real bonus structure, and the health insurance sucks. BSD is a company with a few hundred people, yet it has all the politics, drama, and bumbling incompetence of a company one hundred times the size. There's also the issue of clueless senior technical management. There is no CTO anymore, and the people who are allowed to guide the technical conversation at the top are incompetent. A power play gone wrong has resulted in the slow starving of the SaaS Tech side of the house, complete with "Indian outsourcing companies will save us!" and all the hilarity that ensues. Because BSD hasn't invested in more than basic maintenance of existing tech for years, competitors like ActBlue are starting to eat BSD's lunch. If you're a smart technical person who wants to get things done the right way, BSD will be a kafkaesque nightmare for you. The destruction is accelerating. Run.

2.0
15 May 2020

Toxic Office Culture

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- snacks, soft drinks, and a good coffee machine. - convenient, public-transit accessible location. - professional development fund is a nice perk. - PTO policy should, in theory, benefit everyone equally. What ends up happening is the same people consistently take a lot of time off, and the lower-level employees have to cover for them more frequently. Bigger teams have more coverage options, so they're able to take more time off. Employees of smaller teams take less time off because of fewer coverage options.

Cons

- They preach a company culture of inclusion, community, friendliness, and acceptance. This is a lie they've sold themselves on. Teams and individuals are extremely cliquey. - There's the notion that team members 'wear many different hats,' and what that really implies is team members without sufficient experience in a given area are given tasks with little direction and end up doing a poor job. There's a lot of "they need to do their job" and "that's not my job" whispered after meetings. - Mid-level managers tend to be younger with little management experience or training in managing a team. It's not uncommon to have a supervisor micromanage and pick apart your work with little positive feedback and a lot of criticism. When something goes wrong or a client is dissatisfied, the associate employees take the brunt of the blame. This was evident across teams. - Health insurance options are infamously terrible. - They claim to encourage employees to explore outside of their direct area of work. This is only allowable once you reach director or deputy director level. - First and foremost, this agency is an email agency. Anyone not on the content and campaigns team is a 2nd class employee. - Most importantly, this agency falsely claims to do work in the political space. This isn't true. They've been resting on this laurel since Obama's '08 and '12 campaigns. Their work is pretty strictly non-profit work with a little corporate work mixed in. Stop lying to applicants.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 117 Reviews

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