This company will hire you under the false pretenses of being a full time architecture photographer with benefits, fly you out to their headquarters in Virginia, showcase the fancy, shiny commercial properties that only a lucky few photographers have managed to take, and almost instantaneously turn your day to day role into one of a sad excuse for a photojournalist taking pictures of complete strangers in towns you've never heard of while berating business owners with a door-to-door salesmen style speech of collecting pictures for neighborhood galleries for first time homebuyers.
This is NOT an architecture photography job.
Depending on your region, you might have 4-5 real commercial photography assignments (called media shoots) a YEAR, while the rest of the miserable time is spent planning your own shoots, finding your own content, shooting, editing, captioning, uploading, curating, and a books worth of useless, arbitrary tasks that could and should be the responsibility of other departments, all aimed at making sure you're pulling off your own quota every week. A wholly arbitrary, incredibly bloated and unreasonable quota set by senior management who all gaslight you into believing it's a "reasonable workload" every time you raise concerns.
This is a job that will work you to the bone doing things you never even remotely signed up for, and within a year you'll be asking yourself why you were even interested in photography in the first place. There have been plenty of weeks where I find it difficult to even get out of bed after working 2-3 weeks straight with no weekends and barely any time to spend with family who have had no choice but to have bore the brunt of this experience along with me. This has been a degrading, depressing, exhausting career move. Never in my 17 year career as a professional could I have ever imagined it was going to be this bad.
The grand irony is that I can't even find time to find a new job since I'm working 6-7 days a week for this company with barely any time to see my family, let alone send out resumes. A feature to CoStar management, I'm sure.
If a recruiter reaches out to you, even for the associate photographer roles that are now flooding the market, stay far away. No amount of money is worth this amount of stress.
