Pros
- the people (anyone not on exec leadership) are brilliant, inspiring, eager, and just all around wonderful - conveniently located to the rest of the city, no matter which office you work in - IPG's benefits aren't blowing anyone out of the water but pretty solid - office leadership could use work on the west coast (can't speak to NY) but they're better than the exec leaders by miles. Office leadership listens and actually tries to do good by their employees
Cons
- consistently understaffed across the board and not in a normal "lean teams" kind of way which is what you'll be told - after interviewing/leaving, realizing the compensation is laughable compared to other agencies. Definitely NOT competitive with market standard - if you work in SF then you work on Apple and you can't show any of it. not a pixel. that's about it unless you join when they have a different client. you may or may not get a short stab at it. - it's all production work. you will not be creative. you will not own anything you'll just do whatever Apple tells you to do - they tried to convince people that it's not staff aug... it's staff aug. that means Apple gives us money to put our employees on an island and forget about them. - unfortunately, staff augmentation has been one of the only ways to allow us some sense of ownership over our work. still can't show it though ;) - while the commute is told up front during the hiring process, leadership still doesn't understand how much this impacts your life and seems to not care. work/life balance is minimal and to top it all off, you're required to run your PTO by the client, making the employees feel even more disconnected from their employer and colleagues. - Exec leadership is honestly a joke. they are not leaders and most of us don't acknowledge them because they don't do anything effective. and they're all white guys who just hire more white guys. they don't care about diversity, inclusion, women, or anything that makes a company great and sets us apart. basically, we all know nothing and they know best - Elephant has not changed since I joined. The SF office's client is STILL Apple, even after striving to shake things up a bit. The work is still production work, the commute still sucks, the pay is still below market value. We try so hard to make changes but it just feels like every suggestion just gets a "maybe later dear" type of response no matter who you are or what your job is. It's discouraging and it makes you feel like you don't know how to do your work - leadership (office-level and exec) goes back and forth on so many decisions that it's maddening - there is no growth. and that's regarding employee headcount, clients, type of work, etc. - we can't make hires unless there's a direct line to revenue which ends up impeding any hope of growth on so many different levels - plenty of talking from agency leaders and no action. i find myself chasing privileged rich white guys around for answers rather than affecting change and doing my actual job. constantly felt as though I had to run around in circles to get my job done or do what is asked of me - the growth opportunities were always very cloudy. during my entire time, I never knew what I needed to do to get to the next level and grow and it seemed as though no one else did either. Career moves are near impossible. - honestly, we work at Apple so much that we might as well go there, make more money, get better perks and benefits, do the same commute, and the same work. - We don't have a culture or any form of values that we can accurately articulate to our own employees