Pros
Kinetic is a place that is the sum of its parts. They are scrappy and driven to make amazing things happen for their clients in retail. They are just are driven to make work life just as awesome. In the time I was there I saw the company grow and take a special interest in its employees quality of life at work. Being a design and development firm, they are fully aware of the reality that come along with being: from time to time, deadlines appear and work can get a little busier. But I've seen the team pull together and produce work that can only be described as pure magic. My feeling when I was there was that management was fully sensitive to the fact that people work hard and and deserve to have a culture that is just as concerned about people's well being as their health. Whether it was replacing ALL the desks with standup/sitdown desks, having snacks and fresh coffee available all day, organizing team building outings, catering to the needs of vegans and vegetarians on staff, or welcoming team pet projects for the sake of fostering the culture of innovation, it was clear to me that Kinetic really cares about its employees. I am 100% confident in saying that I learned more than my fair share of the skills that I currently possess at KC. The things I learned there, both hard and soft skills, have been indispensable to me in my career and have prepared me to take work and knock on doors that I would have thought too much or too big, had it not been for KC. I also learned what a tight knit team could do with everyone working toward a common goal. People really pull together there. and they do it cheerfully and energetically. There are more than a few legitimate geniuses on staff, and yet they are humble about it. Nearly all of the extraordinary people who were at Kinetic when I left are still there and are still very happy! I would recommend Kinetic to anyone who's ready to work with some of the most brilliant people in the business and take their career to the next level.
Cons
Just as I said Kinetic is the sum of its parts, there were sometimes a few people who were never satisfied. Some complaints I heard were pretty unreasonable. Here are a few (yes they are actually real!): 1. "Why is there only lunch on Fridays?" (I thought that was awesome, but why expect lunch every day?) 2. "Why don't I have 2 laptops? One for office and one for home? 3. There aren't enough lunch options at Yonge and Queen's Quay (false, Waterpark place is one block away - full food court) 4. One staff member wrote an aggressive letter to management demanding they buy a breakfast machine because they didn't want to wait in line or pay $2.99 at Tim Hortons downstairs for a breakfast sandwich. Regardless of the fact that breakfast machines take longer, require cleanup, and would cause a line in the kitchen as long as Uncle Tetsu's because they only make 2 sandwiches at a time. An old office of mine actually had one and it took 2 weeks before it was never used again for the above reasons. And so on. Fortunately those people would leave eventually, leaving the majority of the staff happy as usual. But I always wished management and their team leaders would be a little quicker about weeding those bad apples out. People like that didn't seem to care that they interrupted the flow of collaborative work and culture for their own sense of entitlement. It happens at every company, but at a place like Kinetic, where innovation and culture are they key to their success, people like that can really slow things down and leave the rest of their respective teams picking up the slack.