1. Poor leadership. This firm is run by people who really lack management wisdom and charisma - arbitrary design decisions, very emotional and personal preferences over logic, lack of knowledge and don’t care either how much workload there really is and how much staff need to be put on each project - thus understaffed situation and working overtime happen in most of the projects. Usually 1-2 weeks before the deadline, you won’t finish without staying til midnight.
2. No mentorship. This is not a place for junior designers to start with. Young designers without experience won’t get mentorship from a technical aspect or design level. They hire young designers just because they are cheap. Senior designers won’t guide you through whatsoever but expect you to handle something with a very limited time. Some designers with titles are also very inexperienced and extremely disorganized themselves.
3. Resist to new technology. It’s 2020 and I’m very surprised how resistant people here are towards Revit/BIM. Maybe they are not worried about getting new projects so there is no need to change and improve efficiency. Outdated work methods lead to low productivity and accuracy. Ridiculous amount of time is spent on extremely inaccurate 3d modeling in sketchup (yes, not even Rhino), manually debugging discrepancies between plan and elevation drawings, and fixing material tags, dimension scales etc. on sheets.
4. Limited software licenses and unprofessional IT team. Basically you get emails on a daily basis from your colleagues asking for licenses. I can’t believe this happens in a firm with over 250 employees. The IT team is very unprofessional and you need to personally ask for every software’s updates. The software editions are not always aligned even within one team. You can’t always open your colleague’s CAD or Indesign files since you haven’t reached out to IT and ask for updates.
5. Lack of creativity. This firm is highly replying on Pinterest for “design inspirations”. Their designs are basically collages put together from everywhere. And the boundary between a mood board and a direct copy (maybe a little revisit) is not always very clear.
6. High turnover rate. People who are not great with politics have to leave since some bipolar management level is the queen’s favorite clown and simply impossible to work with. During my 2 years there, half of the people in the studio are gone.
7. Benefits are not great. There are no PTO for the first 6 months there.
