Decent - Production Coordinator FIRST Employee Review

Strong, supportive culture where people genuinely care about each other. Leadership invests in employee growth and long-term development. Stable company with a vision and consistent performance. Opportunity to work with exciting clients in a dynamic, creative industry.

Fast-paced environment can be demanding at times. Growth opportunities can sometimes depend on team/department needs. As with any continuously evolving company, processes are evolving in some areas.

All perks were slowly stripped away. Complete bait and switch on use of Gym, Game Room, Band Room, Yoga classes etc. High quality meals were reduced to cafeteria level slop.

When Google opened their flagship event spaces at Pier 57, FIRST staffed up teams of specialists to cover them with a diverse group of highly experienced techs and a second tier of event techs for the smaller rooms. Within the first year, the team culture deteriorated to a Jr. High School level of cliques, backstabbing, favoritism, and pettiness. There is severe disciplinary action for isolated mistakes and absolutely no recognition for hard work and loyalty. The pressure from Google constantly increases, every management decision is based on serving the next level up. The percentage of time doing the actual job you were hired for averages out to be around 15%. The vast majority of time is spent in meetings. Team meetings, meetings about when to have the next meeting, town halls, weekly staff meetings - it never ends. And goal setting? What a colossal waste of time. You could spend months working on ideas and projects that would help your team and yourself grow and develop only to have every single thing shot down. The message from FIRST is always touchy-feely HR speak but the message from direct management is always political strangulation. Just keep your head down and don't attract attention. A little over a year or so, FIRST decided that they wanted any tech to be capable of working in any space across the NYC campus so they asked the specialists to begin cross-training techs working at a lower rate to be able to work in the specialists work spaces. The knee-jerk reaction was, "Wait a minute, are we training our replacements?" We were repeatedly assured by managers - Smith, Judeh, and Reese that we were being paranoid. Last week, they gutted everyone in the specialist roles, leaving only one person per department. Now, those responsibilities fall to techs in the next tier and expectations are often to do several roles at once. For a company that prided itself on it's culture and perks, Google has allowed shareholders to squeeze every last dime out of what made it an amazing place to work. And for a company that prides itself on transparency, FIRST has been duplicitous, manipulative, and outright deceptive in how it treats it's staff at Pier 57. They hide behind NDA's to avoid any accountability in their mismanagement. So many really talented people with families have had the rug pulled out from underneath them, losing full time work with benefits right before summer when things traditionally slow down. This has been the absolute worst work experience that I've ever had, can't wait to get out.