Pros
• You'll train for your next job • You can find a few people who are genuinely kind and empathetic • You'll make more money than retail so I'd recommend it if you're in the post-college under-employment phase of your career • Types of work change frequently but only if you aren't assigned to a single client • Don't like coworkers? Odds are they'll be gone in 6 months. • There's a chance you'll land on one of the portfolio-building projects that are intentionally bleeding out money rather than one of the bloated, massive money-making fed contracts. But good projects are based on seniority, so it's unlikely. • You'll learn to write really well because you'll spend months having supervisors with no editorial background nitpick about the way they feel about your every word choice. • You'll learn to be your own advocate because you'll have to justify every task (breaking everything down to the 15 minute mark for every day) to your supervisor. No matter how necessary it is to the completion of the project - if it's an annual report, prepare to justify why you needed to research through the last year's worth of data because it wasn't explicitly scoped into the proposal. • The supervisors who used to insist that employees call in for conference calls even on days where they were taking PTO are no longer with the company, although for completely unrelated reasons.
Cons
• Morale is often low enough that a few times, I saw coworkers burst into tears at their desks. • Compensation is easily 25% below industry standard, with some positions being far worse. • If you're working too many hours (60+ or 7-day weeks), it's your fault for choosing to take on too much. So if you're the type to hold yourself to high standards because failure is unacceptable, don't make any night or weekend plans. • Designers are asked frequently to churn out "meeting fodder" mock-ups that are out of scope, not on any timeline, and with only 12-24 hours' notice, just to have "something pretty to show" during a non-design presentation. • You are always replaceable, from entry-level to director, if you're a "bad fit" you can vanish overnight (it overrides the "three strikes" rule in the handbook). • Embrace a clique and do it immediately. Sorority experience will help you greatly. Being unpopular is one of the biggest threats to your job security here. Bond with people over who's had the most coffee, the longest hours, and the least sleep. • Turnover is about 20% every 6 months, sometimes much higher but sometimes they'll go a whole month without losing someone. To mitigate this, you're expected to be able to replace anyone on your entire team at any given moment. • Expect 0 support in skill development, but you will be assigned projects that you have no expertise in so be ready to learn fast. • Expect 0 control over the direction of your career, because you could have a job title that has no bearing on what you do (your title is only about how expensive you are to the client since there's no clear roles & responsibilities) • If you land as 100% billable to a single fed client, you might watch people make amazing campaigns and getting to do real marketing while you get stuck arguing for a full month about the word choice in a 4 paragraph newsletter with a 2% open rate for a sub-sub-sub section of the government no one's ever heard of. • Things are so siloed that an all-hands meeting was called to address why no one knew each others names (reading between the lines: some teammates didn't know one another and it led to an embarrassing client meeting) • You will never work from home. Your coworkers can never work from home. Expect to get sick a lot, and to still come into work or burn a full 8 hours' PTO. • PTO. • You will never be allowed to change your assigned seating. (Asking is a massive taboo). • You will be lectured every week about cleaning up after yourself and your coworkers - not pushing in a chair, leaving cords visible in a conference room, walking past litter are unacceptable behaviors that "severely damage brand image" • There is no feedback, only criticism. And reviewers (usually your supervisor or a senior strategist because only one team happens to have a real editor) will never be satisfied with deliverables. • You have no ownership over your work, so if you do not implement every change suggested by every person from every team and often from people who were involved in the project two years ago and have no clue what's going on, you will be asked to redo your work until every single suggestion has been incorporated. Reviewers' words are law. Designers, take heed. • Reviewers are often frustrated because they would have gone about a task differently. Consider the ramification of that when you have non-designers judging graphic design work. "I wouldn't have done it this way. I'm the reviewer. Go back and do it my way." • Reviewers (again, these are people with no editing/design experience) will take great pride in lasering in on details and go to great lengths to make corrections to your work - sometimes to the point of redoing it or taking more hours than you did to create it. The more minute and insignificant an error is that they find, the more pride they take in their "great attention to detail". Be prepared to be accused of making the hours go over budget when this happens. • Graphic designers, developers, UXers, prepare to be ordered to remove all lorem ipsum for real content, and then have to do endless revision rounds that will do nothing except be copyediting changes to the greeking. • UXers, your wires need to be photo-realistic absolutely highest fidelity. You cannot proceed until every font and color is approved, designers will get mad that you backed them into a corner, strategists will wonder why the hell you're so slow. And then every phase after wires (design, dev, testing), you'll have to go back and edit your wireframes to reflect every iteration. • Reviewers, under the guise of being prepared to defend your work, will make up potential "devil's advocate" problems trying to dream up any potential question that a client might have. You're expected to read their mind about how they're planning to read the client's mind. • The risk of asking the client their opinion on anything with fewer than 3 weeks of revisions is too high. Saving face is worth every conceivable cost, and thousands of hours each year. • You will have supervisors who want to know where you are, what you're working on, constant updates, and to be CC'd on ever email because there's no trust that anyone is doing their job. • Always remember to turn on the intra-office chat, that's your roll call, if you're not there then they'll assume you're not working at all. • I know most of us with long-term partners commiserated over the inevitable fights we'd have about our hours, justifying that "this is just what DC agency life is like." • Work life balance was best summed up by the owner. When asked whether a branded onesie was in the works after a coworker announced a pregnancy, he replied with utter disdain, "Of course not! We don't want to encourage any more of THOSE."