A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
Pros
A growing, mid-size architecture firm focus mainly on healthcare design. You get the opportunity to be exposed to many different types of healthcare work within a short amount of time. There are some good mentors who are a great resource and willing to take time to teach you about the business. The office is set in a laid-back neighborhood that is not as chaotic as downtown LA or other parts of Los Angeles. For as long as I worked there, the office environment was considered positive and the recent interior remodeling at kitchen and office spaces was a nice touch the firm tried to improve its appearance.
Cons
c|a Architects was like a 60 years old trying his/her hands on Instagram or TikTok. The firm had done mostly smaller projects of TI and equipment replacement and was not well equipped to handle larger scale or ground-up projects. Their contract models were outdated and were not reflective of the actual work time, which led project managers to assign unrealistic hours to the team. Production team was also on a constant shuffling which created a lot of confusion and discontinuation for the life of a project. Management seemed to be in disarray and their internal communication was ineffective. Often time production team would be put under so much pressure to meet deadlines by result of poor planning and overlapping of other projects. Principals/ project managers acted like human garbage who would, fabricated lies to blame a project’s failure on the hard-working person, overlooked the many contributions a person put into work and reduced him/her to just a drafter, treated people differently by favoritism, etc. It was also impossible to consult with HR because the position was shared by principals whose background were interior design and marketing.