Aisle Rocket Reviews

ARS sells itself well during the interview process; however, once you’re in, you quickly realize it was all smoke and mirrors. Below are just some of the malfunctions of this laughable company. NON-COMPETITIVE SALARIES – If you are looking to make more, especially as Chicago’s cost-of-living rises, ARS is not your answer. If you’re lucky enough to get what you ask for, it’ll be used against you when it’s time for raises or layoffs. PORTFOLIO OF WORK DOESN’T REPRESENT CURRENT CATALOG OF CLIENTS: Read up on some of the bigger names, and you’ll be able to infer how much active work ARS actually has. They struggle to win new business, resulting in annual layoffs. NO DEFINABLE CULTURE – Between mass exoduses and annual layoffs, moving into a Chicago office without an established culture and identity, and with a leadership team that needs a complete overhaul, it will be quite some time before ARS has a culture worth mentioning. PLEASE NOTE: The MI office has/had a culture of its own and the TN office is the hub for operational related transactions, such as Accounts Receivables and Payables. Don’t allow posts related to those offices to be any indication of Chicago office culture. LIMITED PERKS – Actual “perks” include free coffee, snacks and quick pantry style/frozen meals (while supplies and budgets last). Working from home is only an option for select few employees. At the point of my departure, there was no “booze cart” or beer-on-tap, which are perks about which they often boast. With the new office comes a “Wellness Room,” which is located right off of the entrance and is currently utilized as a storage closet. Bringing dogs to work is only applicable in MI. TOXIC, POLITICAL, AND IMMATURE WORKING ENVIRONMENT – If you want to survive at ARS, plan on falling in line and curbing your ideas and opinions. EXCEPTION: Brown nose the leadership team, date a team lead, agree with their ideas and praise them, and you’ll succeed! If you’re eager to travel back in time to your high school days, surrounded by cliques, gossip, and rumors, and where the head cheerleader and quarterback ruled the halls, ARS is THE place to work. ZERO TRANSPARENCY – Leadership has mastered the art of zero transparency. EXAMPLE: Instead of addressing layoff rumors, they allowed their teams to sit in paranoia for weeks until the layoffs started to happen, and even then never communicated the five important “W’s”: who, what, where, when, and why. This is just one of many examples of their inability to understand and incorporate transparency into the DNA of ARS. AMBIGUOUS ORGANIZATIONAL HIERARCHY – Current hierarchy includes: leadership team, team leads, and the dispensables. ARS claims to have a leadership team, which is a falsehood as this team lacks all qualities of true leadership and rarely works well together. The definition of a leadership team at ARS essentially means a group of VPs, and not all VPs are treated equally. Second in line are “team leads.” There is significant ambiguity surrounding this team, which results in much time being wasted when trying to schedule meetings and obtain approvals/direction. These “decision makers” are often unavailable because they’re spread too thin. Dispensables are those who actually contribute to the success of the company. They are the one who are the least recognized and appreciated. Members of this group have been replaced by a freelancer and/or an off-shore team. NOTE: ARS is not trying to be an “agency”; therefore, you may end up with a made-up title that isn’t in line with your career goals. LACK OF INTEGRITY – ARS Leadership is known for making false promises. An example (one of many) is when they announced to their IL team that they would open a satellite suburban office after they migrated IL operations to downtown Chicago, and then changed their minds. During a significant time of change, this was a beacon of hope for those living in the suburbs. This was a chance to maintain work/life balance and not increase personal expenses with a city commute. With absolutely no announcement of their decision to not proceed with said satellite office, they allowed rumors to fester about said plans, all while laying people off right before the holidays. SMOKE AND MIRRORS – When I interviewed at ARS, their leadership team bragged about how either they, or other members of the team, have left ARS and came back because it’s such a great place to work. It is true that people have returned to ARS after leaving; however, the reasons for these employees returning is unknown. Leadership likes to believe it’s because ARS is a great opportunity for all, but based on my experience there, I imagine a return to ARS is an act of desperation or convenience. Leadership will tell you they want you to help improve current ARS and mold future ARS, which means, true story, “We’ll tell you what change will be and what the future of ARS will look like. You will agree and get everyone else to be on board.” That is what your participation will look like. The “empowered” is powerless. BUSINESS NEGLIGENCE – The leadership team manages ALL RFP requests. They wait until the absolute last minute to assemble their pitch, have no organized work history or templated deck, and stress out their already overworked team with design/copy requests, requiring late hours, including weekends, in an effort to win new business and then are surprised when they don’t succeed. As a result, ARS continues to rely on their pillar, retainer-based clients who end up cutting budgets by bringing more work in house/reducing their shopper marketing investments, and consequently have to lay off more employees than they can operationally support without putting more stress on their already stressed and unhappy survivors. They were presented with a huge monetary, and possibly award-winning, opportunity where one member of their leadership team wanted to take a “different approach,” where “different” means “inexpensively outsourced,” and lost said business due to poor project management and complete negligence.

Let me start by a brief explanation of the development team and then work my way to more of the general feel of the agency. The developers are an amazing group of individuals to work with. They are all very talented, patient, and extremely flexible people that strive to deliver the best possible work even though a majority of the work involves ridiculously tight deadlines. The development team is held with extremely high regard within the agency. However, the talents of the development team is only limited to the developers and does not extend to team leadership and management of the department. I question the capabilities of the team leads as they’ve demonstrated an inability to make decisions that conform to the industry’s best practices. There’s a lot of fluff and big talk by the leads about how the company is making huge strides in disrupting the market and that their paving the way for the future. Take those claims with a grain of salt as some of them are about as inflated as some of the job titles that you may find at Aisle Rocket Studios. While we are on the topic of inflation, here is an example of some of the inflated practices of the office. ARS will claim that they are an agile shop even though none of the projects exercised the agile development life-cycle during my tenure at Aisle Rocket Studios. They will claim they are a data-driven agency. There is no data. These are the more blatant lies you encounter prior to getting hired or during your early employment at Aisle Rocket Studios; others are more subtle. They will claim that the shop works with cutting edge technologies when this is only the case for a small handful of projects. Some of them will never see the light of day, some of them will get shut down. This happens more often than not. Most of their architectural decisions are extremely archaic so bad practices and bugs will be rampant. If you plan on working here, be emotionally prepared to be frustrated with day to day tasks. Management is extremely cheap in setting up a project correctly so the development life-cycle tends to move at glacial pace. Be prepared to work countless long nights and be expected to have chaotic product launches. Expect team leads to defend their honor by telling you stories of how they've overcome situations similar to this back in their heyday. When you persevere, which you will, you may bask in the glory of an ephemeral "Thank You" note. Don't expect a raise. Now, let's move onto the general cons of the agency. There's a pecking order between teams. To get far, you need to know who you have to cater to. Cliques are rampant, drama is rampant, and nepotism is rampant. You have to know the right people to get recognition, and working for the wrong ones might have your own career development suppressed. Be on the wrong team, or have the wrong boss and your work might be glossed over and your superiors might take ownership of your ideas and claim it as their own. Leadership has little regard for their employees. They will commit to outrageously unrealistic timelines so employee disgruntlement will be rampant. Benefits and competitive pay are about as much of a joke as leadership is capable. They will meet behind closed doors and claim that they want to hear our stories, our concerns, and our pain points. They will encourage us to be ‘change agents’ in the office but there is never any change, just massive layoffs.