Salary - Architect Powell Dobson Archiects Employee Review

The location works well on the outskirts of the city with good access and easy parking, which makes the commute more manageable than a city centre practice. The peer-level colleagues are good people and genuinely supportive of each other, though in my experience that's fairly typical of architectural practices generally. If you're weighing up options, unless specified, good colleagues are more of a baseline expectation than a differentiator worth factoring heavily into your decision. The project work can be interesting depending on which sector you land in. Healthcare and education projects vary in complexity, and on occasion the practice takes on genuinely challenging and rewarding commissions. There are some social touches. There's a coffee machine, fruit, and a table tennis table that some of the team make good use of, and occasional treats that go down well on the floor.

Compensation for the level of experience and responsibility expected sits below the sector average, and the benefits package does little to offset that. Any perks that do exist tend to be limited in practice or quietly removed over time. If salary and benefits are a priority for you, it's worth doing your research before committing. Resourcing is a genuine problem and one that never really gets addressed. The resourcing on the major project I worked on was, frankly, inadequate for its scale and complexity. It was clear that commercial decisions had been made that squeezed the budget available for staffing, and the people actually doing the work were left to manage the consequences of that. For the size and complexity of the project, we were significantly understaffed throughout. That's not sustainable and the pressure it creates is constant. The practice closed their London office, then later their Swansea office. Each time, the active workload from those offices landed with the remaining teams without any meaningful increase in resource. Whatever was saved on premises didn't find its way to the people absorbing the extra work. If working from home sounds like an option when you join, don't count on it lasting. I had an agreed arrangement that was gone within a year, replaced with full time office attendance. I was told on one occasion that working from home on an unscheduled day, despite having no colleagues in and a loud office environment, would be considered misconduct. If flexibility matters to you, get everything in writing from day one. If they refuse to amend employment details, proceed with caution. The inconsistency in how rules get applied is something you notice fairly quickly. Minor timekeeping issues for some people resulted in formal meetings, while other behaviour, such as openly browsing personal websites during work hours for extended periods went unaddressed even after being raised. It's hard to shake the feeling that the same standards don't apply to everyone equally. At a management level, there are a lot of associates and directors relative to the size of the team, but that doesn't translate into strong leadership or support. Resource planning tends to be reactive rather than considered, and when things go wrong it's the people at the bottom who absorb it. The approach to people at the lower end of the structure tells you a lot about the culture. A junior member of staff doing solid work and supporting others through a stressful period asked for a modest pay increase, was turned down twice, and left for a better offer elsewhere. For a very small amount of money they lost someone the team genuinely valued, and the reaction on the floor reflected that. On another occasion someone was let go during their probationary period and escorted off the premises by security without being able to speak to colleagues on the way out. The receptionist, who had been there a long time, remarked that they'd never been good at letting people go. Hard to disagree. If you ever find yourself in a formal process of any kind, whether performance related, absence related, or otherwise, be prepared for a process that prioritises reaching a conclusion over establishing facts. Evidence relied upon in findings may not be disclosed to you. Requests for disclosure may go unanswered. Conclusions can be reached that are not supported by the evidence presented. In my case this coincided with the loss of a close family member, which made an already difficult experience considerably harder. It was a drawn out process that I wouldn't wish on anyone. It's also worth being aware that personal relationships within the organisation can influence professional decisions and processes in ways that aren't always transparent or appropriate. That's something I became aware of over time and it affected my confidence in the fairness of how things were handled. The benefits don't really amount to much in practice. If it's still offered, the birthday day of leave has to be taken within two weeks of your actual birthday, which makes it feel more like a restriction on when you can take leave than a genuine perk. At one point there was a trial scheme where accumulated unpaid overtime could convert to a day off the following month, capped at one day. A colleague's response when it was announced was "I guess it's better than nothing." That probably sums it up. There's a coffee machine and occasional treats which some people enjoy, but a lot of the team saw them more as a substitute for anything more meaningful. The hiring situation is worth paying attention to before you join. In my experience the practice found it difficult to attract experienced local talent and leaned heavily on graduates, placement students and people willing to travel significant distances. One colleague's significant commute gradually went from nothing to three days a week. It's worth doing your research on the practice's reputation in the local sector before making a decision. There were periods, sometimes months at a time, where you'd get your head down with good colleagues, do good work, and things would feel relatively normal. But something would always come around, whether a policy change, a resourcing decision, or something more personal, and that feeling of being managed rather than trusted would creep back in. By the end I realised that pattern had been consistent throughout. Autonomy is limited, flexibility is limited, and the benefit of the doubt is rarely extended. Several colleagues said the same thing independently over the years. It builds up gradually and by the time you notice how much it's affected you, it already has.

Lovely team and good projects

I don’t really have any!