Talented colleagues, but stifled creativity and poor HR support
Pros
- Really talented and kind colleagues - Some incredibly skilled leadership especially in the creative teams, but they are often wastd, stifled, and forced into being yes-men for the higher-ups - Some nice initiatives like 4 day weeks in August and WYW as well as some nice team-building events and activities. They try to build community in the office. - Pay is not bad for Hungary, but getting a raise is almost impossible (they don't do annual increases, you can only get a raise if you get promoted, which is tough with inflation rates)
Cons
- The HR team is hands-down the most useless HR I've ever ever ever worked with. I genuinely don't know what they do all day, definitely not helping colleagues or making employees' lives easier. My onboarding was non-existent, and there were so many rules, initiatives, and support measures I wasn't told about and only heard about through my co-workers later. - The creative work is SOOOOOOOO boring. Clients have SUCH strict and rigid ideas of what they are and aren't willing to approve, leaving absolutely no room for creative freedom or any real ideas worth anything. and account executives and higher-ups are so afraid to say no to clients or to push back that any good idea is dead in the water before it even begins - Account execs bend to everything and anything clients ask for, and its almost always to the detriment of the creative teams and the work. Deadlines are unrealistic, and clients somehow expect you to perform miracles with very, very low budgets. - The approval process takes months and months. One campaign can easily take 6-8 months of revisions and tweeks before it sees the light of day. This is partly because campaign objectives and messaging frequently change mid-campaign, and no one pushes back, and partly because the approvers are constantly changing, so you have to take the feedback from a million different people on board before anything can move forward. - Executive leadership is out of touch with how lower-level employees feel. They will feign interest in getting feedback, but then take no measures to implement changes or act on the feedback. I don't know if they are ignorant or just don't care.
