Pros
1) The pay is decent for a new grad. 2) The general age range skews young (20s-30s). I liked that as it meant I could work with people around my age.
Cons
1) The team is understaffed and overworked. Management continues to take on projects regardless of capacity, overworking the associates for months, all while promising that things would "lighten up soon." 2) Communication is emphasized as a value but is ignored by management. Overworked associates would approach management to let them know that the assigned work for the day could not be completed by EOD-- the consistent response was, "As long as it's done by morning, it's fine." This resulted in many late nights, and nine out of ten times the work would be thrown away in the morning as it was no longer "in scope" or "aligned with our story." Upper management needs to be involved earlier in the project, rather than coming in halfway to say that the work is "unaligned" and having us redo it. This is a consistent issue. 3) The company does not respect PTO and the CEO breaks written promises. When people are on PTO, they are still expected to check emails and respond to Slack messages. The CEO sent out a team email stating that Thurs+Fri after a company event would be time off for the entire team. When Thursday came around, the CEO decided that the project we’d been working on for weeks was wrong, and that the entire team needed to work not only during the promised PTO but the weekend as well. The CEO never acknowledged that the team had written confirmation from the CEO that Thurs+Fri would be off. 4) Major micromanagers. We had multiple daily touchpoints, on top of touchpoints for each project throughout the week. That, in my opinion, is an insane amount of time to spend "touching base.” And even with all of these meetings, communication is so poor between managers and the CEO that the slides always have to be redone at least twice before the CEO approves. 5) Facetime. The company is transitioning to a hybrid work model. I agree that being in office with your teammates has value, but there is no need to micromanage when a person arrives / leaves. TLDR: if you are okay with being a slide monkey that spends 90% of your time addressing comments that say "beef this up," "pithy this up," "but what does this mean to the client?" rather than producing original work, love being micromanaged, and have no respect for boundaries and personal time, then maybe you could tolerate this place.