A corporate monster in a Jony Ive costume - Visual Designer Fjordnet Employee Review

This used to be a place where being challenged to do your best was a constant. It was never a perfect place, and I doubt any place is, but things changed drastically when it got acquired back in 2013. In New York, the company merged with 2 other companies that had a significantly different culture, and while that doesn't always have to be a bad thing, in this case it was. Mediocrity became the norm, and people learned very quickly how to game the system and work out their promotions. Attitude is rewarded over aptitude, and being properly skilled to do your job is not even a consideration. In order to get a promotion, you need to be close to the studio lead or voice your opinion in the most unnecessary situations in the office so that people remember that you exist and that you constantly contribute to the studio culture. What ends up happening is that people with very little design skills and better soft skills get promoted, while the people that are actually doing the little good work that comes out of the office get their 1.2% annual bonus and a pat in the back. Then comes the constant car sales pitch, where you feel embarrassed that the projects that are being sold to the clients are terribly scoped, horribly leaded and poorly resourced. Your skillset is never properly considered, so you find teams that are very poorly prepared to do the job, while the ones that are prepared are working on powerpoints for the management. Then comes the recruiting, where people are lured in and made believe that Fjord does actually relevant work. That they are constantly working on innovative projects and that a lot of it actually gets developed. Nothing could be farther from reality. As a designer, you'll be working on user journeys, powerpoints and very expensive PDFs until the day you die. It's all smoke and mirrors, nothing you'll work ever gets released, and all of that design thinking they release with their 'Trends' every year never gets applied on your day to day. The disconnect between the studio management and the rest of the team is more than obvious. To the point that they will never show up to happy hour drinks – if they ever have happy hour drinks – or even know what you are working on. Their day to day is mostly focused on keeping Accenture and Fjord's upper management happy so that it seems that they are doing a great job, thus getting a hefty promotion and bonus by the end of the year. Twice a year there's a survey that all the studios have to fill to get a sense of where things are standing and improve upon them. But it becomes a show where the studio lead will sugarcoat all the results and no action gets triggered. It doesn't matter how discontent people are, they will always find a way to make it look like things are going great. In my years at Fjord, I never saw that survey changing anything at all, and in my last year we were constantly pushed by our managers to fill the survey so that the participation was high, and our studio lead didn't get pinged by the upper management. During my last two years there, we were constantly requesting transparency and honesty, and even though the studio management claimed they were being transparent, you could find them whispering to each other in the studio on a regular basis. It felt more like a drug transaction than a transparent workplace. Additionally, You will feel that you are all by yourself in the big Accenture system. Your studio lead doesn't care about you, and if you ask for promotions or rewards or assistance on other matters, they'll put the blame on Accenture. They'll only try to reward you if you quit, so that it looks like they tried to keep you. They have very little respect for craft and skillset, and you are just a tool for them to obtain better benefits. And don't forget that you'll be inside Accenture, so get ready for stupidly long trainings, immensely bureaucratic projects and an extra set of limitations to do your work. Every project feels like an episode of House of Cards. And new tech usage is very limited too. As an example, ask them to show you how the set of screens to test responsive design works, also known by their employees as the 'Responsive Wall'. If after reading all of this you are still considering this company, my advice for you is to stay away. It's no longer what it used to be and it's a shame.