Progressive, Compassionate company culture with an amazing team - Artist Chief Rebel Employee Review

- Talented employees. - Competitive pay scale. - Most employees are kind, compassionate, and progressive.

- While touting a "horizontal" team structure where no one has titles, there are still unspecified "leaders" operating opaquely so as to avoid accountability, make impactful decisions without communication or input, and avoid needing to explain or discuss those choices with anyone else. - There is absolutely no plan in place in regards to how to accommodate, work with, or help support remote workers or contract work. Often, key bits of information such as the time zone in which a contractor is located is not widely communicated to the team and therefore leads to meetings being scheduled at odd hours. Even when the contractor points out the issue, the information is not relayed to the proper team members, causing this scheduling issue to continue ceaselessly. - Poor understanding of what hiring an "independent contractor" entails. In order to preserve the image of a company that values work/life balance, contractors are prevented from setting their own schedule, which is a vitally important piece of operating as a contractor. The company wants to be able to claim that no one works more than 8 hrs per day and that no one works on weekends. As a contractor, at times, weekend hours are the most productive hours in my schedule. Additionally, working more than 8 hours in a day is at times preferable in order to offset the need to accommodate other unrelated work or responsibilities being carried out during other days of the week. This is the natural benefit of working as a contractor; flexibility. - There was no design document completed. There was no style guide completed. These are vital resources necessary for providing new team members with a comprehensive breakdown of the completed concept art, narrative, world building, design philosophy, culture kits, etc. Attempting to create synergistic art assets without an established foundation document is extremely frustrating and time consuming. - There is no universally organized system of asset cataloguing and access. Concept art, game design ideas, bits of coding, and seemingly every other random idea scribbled down are spread out over dozens of mislabeled and organizationally devoid Miro boards, Notion pages, and Slack threads. - There was a complete lack of clear and considered Art Direction or sense of any unified aesthetic foundation to the project. - No clear description of "work to be performed" was defined in the contract, making it impossible to gauge benchmarks, set appropriate time goals and milestones, or have any clear sense of what work needed completion and in what order. Work performed was evaluated based on arbitrary and opaque standards not communicated to the contractor. Contractor was held responsible for hitting standards and goals that were never articulated or communicated to them. - Was told that completed and invoiced billable hours would not be paid out as an unspecified manager or group of managers had chosen to dispute the number of hours worked. This was based on their own subjective expectations of how much progress they personally felt should have been made vs how much progress was actually completed in the given period. Whether or not the person or persons disputing this invoice possessed relevant experience necessary to accurately gauge the value of the progressed work was never questioned as the contractor was given no recourse to request further discussion or arbitration of the issue. Despite the contractor having worked the number of hours specified in the invoice, the work completed was deemed to be of subjectively insufficient value to justify paying the invoice. The contractor was forced to accept a pay cut for that term which amounted to a total pay loss of $2000 from a single months invoiced hours. Once again, this was despite having put in time and effort amounting to a loss of a weeks worth of payment for full time work performed. - Despite there being a 9 hour time difference between the contractor's base location and the CR main office, Contractor was expected to be present for scheduled Zoom meetings at times that prevented having a normal sleep schedule. This at times meant being available at BOTH 1am local time AND 6am local time for meetings that regularly had a duration of 1-2 hours each. Additionally, the time spent during meetings was to be viewed as billable time, and counted toward the 8-hour-per-day cap on hours, meaning that Contractor was expected to carry out 8 hours worth of work in a total of 4-6 hours. This led to an inevitable bottleneck that could not be resolved. - Contractor was hired to perform the work of a UI artist. Over the duration of the contract, the Contractor was asked to perform various tasks that fell well outside the typical tasks associated with UI art including concept art, creative development, and principal illustration work. Additional pay was was not offered or discussed despite those tasks normally being associated with higher-paying roles.