Pros
Used to have an amazing team of really hard-working, intelligent, and supportive people. - Remote work - Technically "unlimited PTO" - Great experience working with a variety of different emerging technologies - Work with well-known brands and talent - Small team means you wear a lot of hats and get experience in lots of different roles - Very positive attitudes - Always learning new things A lot of people genuinely care about each other, and it feels like a "family".... at first
Cons
- Recent acquisitions lead to the entire company getting new employment contracts with almost no time to review. Executive management actively discouraged employees from seeking legal advice. Contracts so were hostile to employees and resulted in over 25% of the company leaving (mostly people in technical roles who didn't want to risk the contract harming future opportunities). - Business/sales team is out of touch with the production team's resources, bandwidth, capabilities, and emerging trends. They just care about making the sale, and it falls on production to make sure they can deliver. - Toxic "family" culture, where everyone is expected to regularly work overtime. Expect to be on-call and answer Slack messages 24/7. No additional compensation or recognition when you work long hours. "Recharge time" and "Unlimited PTO" is available, but it's hard to take them without feeling guilty because there are always multiple projects with very tight timelines - Low pay, and no bonus structure. No adjustment for inflation. No salary transparency. Compensation is not clearly linked to performance. - No protection from scope creep. Producers try their best, but the business development team is so desperate to make clients happy, often to the detriment of an under-resourced production team. - Business development team seems out of touch with emerging technology. Sells unnecessarily complex and uninspired projects that are somehow both extremely complex and terribly boring. - Weird "inner circle" culture, where CEO clearly favors some employees over others. - No transparency over the company's finances (prior to acquisition); all-hands meetings were usually a waste of time where Executives just gave meaningless praise and didn't actually share important information - Despite not being a start-up, they lack the fundamental organization that is expected of a company of this age. No clear leveling guides or paths to professional development. No onboarding or official training. Almost no documentation or official processes - and even if they have it, it's probably lost in a sea of disorganized Google Drive files that half the company doesn't have access to. - Majority of projects come from a single client sponsor, putting the company at extreme risk if that relationship ever gets severed. TLDR: Used to have close "family" culture where people put up with being overworked and underpaid because there was a really great team, and people genuinely enjoyed working together. The acquisition caused a mass exodus, and current employees are more overworked and demoralized than ever.
