Pros
I worked on the creative team and had mostly fantastic interactions with those that really cared about their work within the creative team. The Creative Directors and VP are exceptionally talented people and were fun to work with. If you work hard and have a drive for improvement, it seems like you have a lot of room to grow and work your way up within Photon (at least on the creative team). The pay is definitely higher than most companies in Dallas and their fully paid benefits are a huge plus.
Cons
The onboarding process was nearly nonexistant. I had a 30minute video call with someone I could barely understand instead of someone in my actual office doing it with me. They just showed the platform the company uses as its central hub (which is almost never used except for logging time) and a few other tools which in the long run were not helpful to running my day to day. In my time at Photon I dealt with countless employees that did just the bare minimum to collect a paycheck. I understand that at a large company you can feel like just another cog in the wheel, but the amount of people that didn't try was astounding. I also had "just bad luck" with some of the Account Managers I had to work with. People that let projects get so off the rails in scope and management that VPs had to get involved a month before a project launched. (I was brought it at the very end to help fix some of the issues). Other Accounts people literally just showed up to be seen but did nothing to support the team on the project. The quality of work overall that Photon was intent on pumping out was not all that high. Again, velocity seemed to be the most important aspect to it all. When showing what quality work could look like with the right support from other teams, I had extremely good feedback, but this seemed too difficult to mesh into their current workflows. Poor company culture and communication. Photon struggles with communicating effectively with native English speakers and cultural norms. I would receive emails and even phone calls in the middle of the night from their team in India which seemed wildly inappropriate. My own managers were easy to get a hold of and were able to get me answers but English was their first language. It might also be a cultural or language barrier but I was often confronted by standoffish people that were sometimes downright rude. No remote work for any reason. Even if there was a major life event, sick kid/pet, utility companies coming by, Photon does not let you work remote and you must take PTO for it. This seemed silly as I sat around for month waiting for work to be assigned to me, but when I asked to work from home for a few hours I was met with resistance.
