Pros
There are friendly people who work here, particularly those "in the trenches" (quote from Dimi). If you isolate yourself to a small bubble consisting of just you and your project team, and try to ignore all the company politics / broken processes, it’s not too bad while it lasts. Beyond that, DEPT were a good money donor when they actually had money, and our studio needed the financial support.
Cons
While it may seem like a good place on the surface or even within, remember that DEPT is primarily a marketing company – they will go to great extents to win work, to stay afloat, or to try convince you that negative realities don’t exist. DEPT is simply not equipped at dealing with hard problems – they tried to grow really fast and acquire other studios (including ours), the economic climate changed, they ran out of cash, and they just didn’t know how to handle that. There have been a series of preventable and negligent mistakes that resulted in wave after wave of redundancies. This cycle continues today as they still operate on razor thin profit margins despite the greatly reduced headcount, so you most likely won’t be getting pay rises, and every project that ends (especially if prematurely) can often be your last. In just the last 2 years, I’ve seen management mislead employees with financial figures, lie to potential clients to try win work, sign off on impossible project constraints, grind people into the dirt to keep up with those constraints before making them redundant anyway, lie to the team about why those redundancies occurred (e.g. blaming their “performance”), hire cheaper staff and get existing “redundant” staff to train them, freeze salary increases and take away benefits from employees while continuing to hand each other promotions and doing expensive / unnecessary offsite meetings, complain about why employees keep raising the same issues over and over, and make snide remarks about lack of attendance at non-billable meetings after repeatedly emphasising to people under-the-pump to take initiative and minimise non-billable work time. DEPT’s awards are often earned because they get everyone globally in the company to vote for them. Their B Corp certification is more of a box to tick for sales reasons rather than implementing these positive aspects. The Peakon surveys to gather employee feedback are often ignored (another box to tick), particularly because the one area that seemed to score well (flexible working) is something they’re trying to take away. The list goes on.