Interesting perks, but toxic environment
Pros
- Great subject matter to learn about - Casual dress - Bagel Fridays - Friendly team - Opportunity to go to conferences - Located next to a dog park, and public park - Helicopter rides between some of the offices
Cons
- Constant verbal lashings from design leadership in the office, at your desk in front of everyone, or during meetings. - Poor communication from design leadership. You could ask a simple question like, “Is it X, or is it Y?”, and rather than specifying X or Y, their answer would be, “Yes.” - Unclear expectations. Arbitrary deadlines appear out of nowhere in the past. - Hostile and toxic environment. Leadership reprimands designers for asking simple questions related to projects. - Dishonest at times. Design leadership frequently will say, “Feel free to reach out if you need anything.” But when do you reach out for help, it gets recorded as an issue, or an excuse to say why this employee is not performing well. - Unhelpful weekly 1:1’s. Hardly any guidance for setting a clear path to achieve goals for the project. Instead, they use this as an opportunity to release their anger, or criticize your work, regardless if you completed all the tasks they asked you complete. No such thing as constructive criticism. It’s just criticism. - Poor judgement on how to provide guidance. Rather than seeing each designer with unique set of skills, they imply that they think everyone has the same background, and therefore should behave exactly the same as each other. - Antiquated and inaccurate tracking systems. An excel spreadsheet is used to keep track of everyone’s work, and everyone’s time estimates can be completely off. The only thing leadership cares about is that all numbers add up to 20 points per sprint, regardless of what type and size of task you receive. Leadership also becomes irritated if tickets are carried over from a previous sprint. - Design leadership considered putting negative reviews on designers who don’t work on enough tickets per sprint, or if a ticket has carried over from a previous sprint - regardless of size or difficulty of ticket. With tickets being dependent on POs writing them, the designer will get reprimanded for something they cannot control. - Poor time management. Everyone’s schedule seems to be covered in meetings throughout the day, every day, yet expected to deliver hands-on work with aggressive deadlines. Design leadership berates you for trying to skip 1 standup meeting out of the entire month, for political purposes, despite you bringing up concerns about not having enough heads down time for work, multiple times. There is no such thing as a no-meeting day, as proposed by leadership. - Micro-managing. They will specifically require designers to include design leadership in every meeting, no matter how small the meeting is. - Design reviews are 1 hour long, 3 times a week. Feedback is mostly visual design-focused, even if the project is UX. If not visual design, it’s usually criticism about the project itself, not your work. - Poor planning. Leadership has asked employees to drop everything and fly to a satellite office at last minute. Since this was so poorly planned, all hotels would be booked out, and you would be forced to fly in/out the same day in order to avoid exorbitant lodging prices. - Design leadership has no overall vision, strategy, or ability to inspire the team. - You are your own Travel Agent, Admin, and HR.
