Pros
My name is Tom and I joined Reading Room more than 8 years ago in Australia, currently working as global head of UX. I have since moved to Singapore, so my experience is mainly in these two locations plus visits to the London and Manchester teams. I thought I’d add my perspective to some of the points brought up here before. Reading Room does quite a few things differently from your average digital agency. The power distance is extremely low (Google “Hofstede” if this means little to you). If you walked into any of our offices to play “spot the boss”, you’d find it difficult. Anyone, regardless of their role, is encouraged to speak up if they have concerns about anything. As a general rule, you don’t get rank pulled on you (and if it does happen, it’s frowned upon by senior management). What is viewed unacceptable behaviour, however, is to muddle through without seeking assistance. There’s no stigma in asking for help, and as a general rule, you’ll find it provided. A couple of reviewers have mentioned being moved around the office. This is a natural consequence of the divisional model the company runs. For instance, as a developer, you don’t spend your time in a pool of other devs, being assigned to whatever project comes along. Rather, you work in a team together with PMs, front-enders, visual designers, and you own your clients as a division. This helps people learn from others with different skill sets. The company also makes it incredibly easy for people to get overseas placements. I’ve never seen this happen so much in any other company. One person insinuated that you get promoted if you “socialise with the bosses”. I suggest that’s a facile and unfair statement. What actually happens is that people are moved into jobs that they a) like doing and b) are good at. This isn’t always a linear progression. I know of a developer who wanted to be a project manager, so they got to have a shot at it. A while later they decided it wasn’t for them, so they moved back into a dev role. The current CEO of Reading Room London started out as visual designer. Production director in Singapore used to be a front-end developer. The list goes on. This way of promoting based on interest and capability requires that managers know people, their personalities, desires and capabilities very well. This doesn’t just happen at the annual review, it happens through constant communication. Naturally, this communication takes place informally as much as in the office, so I can see where the “people who drink with the boss get promoted” impression may have come from. We are unapologetic about the recruitment principle being “hire for attitude, train for skill”. Some seem to have misunderstood that for “hire people you can drink with”. We like to think of it as “hire people your team wants to work with”. I’ve seen too many agencies who hire technically brilliant people nobody wants anything to do with, and we’re not about to go down that path. My insight into salary levels is a few years old now, but at the time Reading Room was paying better than any other agency I'd had contact with. I suspect you might earn a bit more if you went client-side, so if the money is paramount to you, you’re happy to work on the same client all the time, and you don’t care much for the points brought up above, you might be better off working for a large corporate.
Cons
The divisional model means that as a specialist dev, designer or UXer you won’t be sitting in a pool of similar people, able to bounce off ideas by turning to your neighbour. The person to your left will invariably have a different job to yours, as will the one to your right. There’s no “head of development” or “head of design” with line management responsibility over devs or designers. This removes one of the natural career progression for specialists. The flat structure means that there aren’t that many managerial positions. People from all kinds of roles do get promoted into these, but there aren’t that many of these positions and people tend to stay at RR for a long time. Instead, more often than not, career progression is in the direction of specialist consultant, which the company has now created structures for. Reading Room does mostly internal and on-the-job training. There isn’t a lot of formal or external training outside of CMS-specific and technical certification. There are pros and cons to that approach. If you’re more of a self-starter and happy to learn on the job you’ll be fine. At Reading Room you’re more likely to work on a project for the government department of this or that, the art museum, or the society of physiotherapists than Coca-Cola or Unilever (although there are exceptions). If it’s important to you to have high-profile consumer brands on your CV, this agency may not be for you. I’d like to think that the kind of work we do (improving the user experience of sites people use to go about their lives or their work) has more of an impact than making campaigns for FMCGs.