Pros
Good place to start out Free soda and coffee, sometimes food Nice environment, most coworkers are great If you’re on a big account, you’ll have a better experience all around (a huge con if you aren’t, obviously)
Cons
Salary. Everyone says it for a reason. Negotiate the highest you can and get everything in writing. The base salaries for junior positions are appalling and completely unlivable for the area. You’ll be lucky if your rent is only half of your income. High turnover rate. Lots of people use this place as a stepping stone, for good reason, and upper management doesn’t seem to care about keeping any kind of team integrity. It doesn’t make for good morale when your team is constantly changing; you start to worry about job security, which leads more people to look for new jobs and quit. Also annoying when new hires are incompetent and/or aren’t being trained properly, which adds up to a lot of wasted time and effort, always on your end and never on theirs. But then again, I guess you get what you pay for... or don’t. Time management? Never heard of it here. It’s either 0 or 100 and you never know what it’s going to be, so be prepared to stay late or work on weekends without any notice. Almost every big project we start is given to us on Friday afternoon and needs to be done by Monday morning... then we wait days for approvals and do nothing. I know part of it is “the industry” but there has to be a better system than this. Junior creatives have no voice. You do what you’re told to do, how you’re told to do it, with zero creative freedom. There are so many talented people here; utilize them instead of putting them in a creative straitjacket. Valet, which sounds nice but in reality is a pain. They whip the cars around like bumper karts in an arcade and damage them frequently. Everyone constantly complains about it, but since it impresses the clients we’re all forced to use it anyway. The lighting is migraine-inducing, especially after 8+ hours. And there’s nowhere to really get away, either. A few of those nap pods would make a huge difference. At the very least one room with lower lighting and comfy chairs.
