Short answer:
All of the upper management personal treat the staff like day laborers. They pay below the industry average, work you to death with insane deadlines and very long hours and then don’t give you so much as a thanks or good job for doing it. They just expect you to come in the next week and do it all over again.
Long answer:
Partners seem to care very little about employee morale, or working conditions. Everyone is expected to work insane hours (50-60 hrs.) and anyone who doesn't or isn't willing because of home, personal or school life is viewed as a lazy/problem employee. The overall mentality of management is to keep the clients happy with no regard to their own employees. Project managers rarely stick up for employees with either the partners or clients. With very few exceptions they do/will not ask for extensions on insane deadlines, will not back a designer’s/engineer’s design and will expect the designers to come in early, stay late and come in weekends with little to no notice is an architect moves up a deadline or makes a large design altering change last minute. While there is a great deal of training and mentorship among the designers, the PMs, partners and PALs have very little training programs setup for new employees with little experience. The turnover rate is incredible, very few people stay for more than a few years and the firm is always posting openings for the same positions with very little interest. Management rarely hires employees with experience or training in this field and it is put on a designer to train them. The designer is then expected to train, teach and design while still struggling with a full design workload while people with the most design experience are. That being said very little training/teaching systems are in place for recent grads and most new employees are thrown into the deep end to fend for themselves. Almost nothing ever changes at this company, there is always talk about improvements and changes but nothing is ever implemented despite there being a committee whose sole purpose is to come up with and implement changes to improve the company. Workloads are not divided equally or even based on experience level. Partners continually keep employees who are not capable of performing the position they have and work is constantly being funneled to other designers to fix and correct adding to their already overloaded schedule. Nothing is ever done to remedy this problem. There is almost no room for growth or advancement. The pay is below the industry standard, the raises are small and the bonuses are nonexistent unless you are management. The benefits are basically the same that you would find anywhere. If you are a recent graduate looking for someplace to gain experience and “pay your dues” in this industry then this might work for you. But if you are looking for anything other than a job that you want to spend 1-2 years at just to gain experience for your resume, then you should look someplace else. The mission statement of the partners is for us to be “one firm” but it is clear that in their minds it is clearly just upper management and the rest of us.
I truly don’t know why I still work here.
