For a long time, I convinced myself the issues I encountered at Carnegie were unique to my experience. Conversations with coworkers eventually made it clear they were widespread. The final few conversations I had indicated that the vast majority of people try to put on a smile, while in reality this company is eating them alive. They want to leave, but the job market is crazy and the workload at Carnegie is crazier, leaving them burnt out and stuck. I consider myself lucky to have been able to leave, and now that I’ve had a while to process everything, I wanted to share my experience.
My friends and family wouldn’t characterize me as an anxious person, but I quickly became severely anxious because of the workload and constant sense of urgency at Carnegie. There were multiple 3-4 month periods where my hair would fall out in clumps because of stress, I had literal heart palpitations, and I developed severe insomnia.
Workload
- If you’re a fan of managing 20-45+ clients at a time, this is the place for you. During interviews with other agencies as I was preparing to leave, multiple hiring managers expressed concern at the size of my client load. It became clear that what Carnegie treats as normal is far from standard elsewhere. To make matters even worse, Carnegie also has the audacity to pay you well below market rate. People in my kind of role, with my experience make at least $40-50k more per year than at Carnegie.
- High performance was consistently rewarded with additional work rather than additional support, compensation, or advancement.
- Scope creep was worse than anywhere I’ve experienced in my career. Additional responsibilities were often framed as "growth opportunities," but they never came with discussion around compensation, title, or whether the added workload was sustainable.
- Carnegie has also consistently struggled to hire backfills, which means existing team members are forced to take on clients from ex-employees on top of their own client loads. Again, no raise with the additional clients.
Leadership
- I experienced multiple situations where credit for work did not consistently go to the people who actually produced it. Recognition often flowed upward rather than to the employees doing the work. In short, I noticed a consistent lack of integrity from those in director+ roles.
- A sizeable number of people in a director or higher position are incredibly out of touch. They’ll come up with ideas for additional meetings and initiatives that involve the rest of their team (who are all overloaded), and their team always feels like they have to smile and accept that new meeting or responsibility. Why? Because the junior team members are afraid of what happens if they push back. More importantly, Carnegie hasn’t put in the work to educate their leaders on how to think critically, ask questions, take accountability, and consider how new processes will affect team morale and bandwidth before their own interests and what will “look good” to the VPs and C-suite. And don’t get me started on the VPs and C-suite.
- On one of the many, many occasions someone on my team quit, it was announced that our team director would “graciously” take on 1-2 of the ex-employee’s clients while we worked to hire a replacement. The vast majority of the directors or above behaved like royalty and as if the real work that goes into this agency was beneath them. How “gracious” of them to take on a few small clients while the rest of us were drowning under our enormous workloads. They’re great at delegation because that’s all they think leadership is. Let me be clear: leadership is not solely delegation. Leadership is also having the humility to listen to your team, know when to step up (without acting like it’s a chore), and know how to advocate for change to so people actually want to stay at the company.
- Micromanagement was pervasive. It took years before I was trusted to complete even small, low-risk internal tasks without manager review—including work I had consistently completed accurately and areas where I was responsible for training other team members. I also experienced situations where projects I led still required approval from managers who had no experience in that area. Rather than empowering employees to use their expertise, the culture often defaulted to unnecessary oversight and assumptions that individual contributors couldn't be trusted to make routine decisions independently.
