Good brands to work with, but internal politics overwhelm the heck out of an employee - Motion Graphics Designer Gen Y Medium Employee Review

The work itself isn’t what drains you, it’s everything around it. This is less an organization and more a layered system of internal politics where decisions rarely travel in a straight line. They get filtered, altered, delayed, or quietly buried depending on who is in the room and who is not. Merit is acknowledged… selectively. Consistency is more of an exception than a practice. At the senior level, things become even more opaque. Leadership often feels split between authority and influence, and the gap between the two is where most of the confusion lives. Priorities change without explanation, feedback depends on alignment rather than logic, and accountability tends to dissolve the higher it goes. There’s also a persistent lack of structure, not the “fast-paced startup chaos” kind, but the “no one is fully sure who owns what” kind. Processes exist, but they bend easily to internal preferences. Communication is fragmented, decisions feel conversational instead of institutional, and execution often becomes a byproduct of navigating internal dynamics rather than actual planning. Over time, it stops feeling like you’re working on projects and starts feeling like you’re managing personalities.