Fahrenheit 212 Reviews

As another former employee notes, Fahrenheit 212 kinda sorta produces a type of advertising, albeit one that isn't necessarily consumer-facing, but rather for clients' internal use. Ultimately it's still a form of selling, just to a different audience. Fahrenheit 212 isn't as buzzword-y as other consultancies that I've been at but it comes close, which I think is neatly illustrated when you ask someone who works there to describe what the company does in a single sentence--the response is bound to be laced with jargon and company catchphrases. None of this is negative, per se, but it's indicative of a disconnect between what Fahrenheit 212 says it does and what it *actually* does. Insofar as capabilities are concerned, what I will say Fahrenheit 212 is good at every once and a while is getting their clients to think differently about a problem (i.e. broaden a client's viewpoint on how to look at their business, their products, or their customers). That's pretty much where it ends. Most projects that come to Fahrenheit 212 these days don't seem to see the light of day in terms of going to market. (I can already hear the protestations from those within the company. They'll say their go-to-market rate since the start of the company is 87%--and that may be true, not disputing the figure--but most of the projects I saw during my time there were usually delivered to a client and never seen or heard of again; I'd be interested in knowing the go-to-market percentage of ideas and strategies from the last 36 months). Fahrenheit 212 has positioned itself between design consultancies and traditional management consultancies, but as a result ends up being a place where things are neither made (in the case of the former), nor quantitatively analyzed (in the case of the latter). The line there is that project teams rely on "inductive" rather than "deductive" methods to come up with ideas, but it usually results in derivative end-products that have neither the originality of a design consultancy, nor the rigor of a management consultancy. In terms of how projects are scoped…it's a mixed bag. Sometimes teams are left ample time to research and develop strategies and ideas for a client, but more often than not project timelines are comically short and project scopes woefully lacking in specificity, which ultimately leads to many late nights and weekends spent making up for it all. I think this can be chalked up to two things: 1) the folks selling the work to clients don't have a great idea of how the sausage is made, which means they don't know how to properly time things, and 2) sales targets turn new business into a "quantity" game versus a "quality" one, which means more projects and less time to do them. This chasing of money also means that there's a desire to sign work at all costs, regardless of whether or not the job / client is *actually* a good fit for the type of work that Fahrenheit does. As a result there are a lot of projects where you can clearly tell that the sales team has tried to awkwardly shoehorn the client's problem into something that Fahrenheit can "solve". The rebuttal there would be "well, we can apply our methodology to any type of problem," but during my time there there were plenty of projects that were clearly not a good fit for a project team's skills and were ultimately a waste of everybody's time. I'd mentioned nights and weekends earlier. Guess what? Everyone works them. It's not uncommon for a work email to slide into your inbox at 11:30pm (which is annoying if you're not in the office, but more than likely you *are* in the office…making it doubly annoying), nor is it uncommon to spend half or sometimes--if you're lucky--a full weekend working. This seems to also be asymmetric: many times, project leaders—-critical team members with broad influence over the work environment, and whose opinions and input are the needed the most--make a bee-line for the door when the clock strikes 6:00pm, usually right after asking the rest of their team if they're "Ok?" or if they've "Got this handled?", and subsequently act surprised when the work comes in under expectations. Well that's what happens when you lead by delegation and head for the door when the rest of the team is pulling late nights. Then, in an effort to shore up sub-standard work, they'll hold "brainstorming sessions"--which they usually spend more time derailing than contributing to--but contribute little to no subsequent hands-on work; all of that is left to the members of the team that can actually make things. There's also the "culture of healthy debate", which *sounds* like a good thing: talking things out and truly attempting to separate the wheat from the chaff is wonderful when it's done right, but truthfully less than half of the people at Fahrenheit 212 take the spirit of this to heart. What usually happens is--in a vain attempt to appear competent and "thought leader"-ish--the majority of employees will try to interject their ideas and opinions into meetings without much thought as to if what they're saying is actually good for the project or the client. Usually what's contributed is disjointed, asinine, and doesn't actually contribute anything beyond satisfying those individuals' desire to hear their own voice, talk over everyone else, and generally display a self-inflated form of "brilliance". Then--in a cheap, second-rate, garden variety show of Machiavellianism--employees will then seemingly take all the credit of a group effort in an attempt to direct the spotlight to themselves as much as possible, when in reality they've contributed a middling amount of thought to the process (and even sometimes actively undermine other team members). This ultimately conspires to create a culture of toxicity within the company, wherein employees are constantly airing "their side" of a particular story to project leads, while those that may not be so comfortable speaking up (or don't feel the need to) are left at a comparative disadvantage; the squeaky wheels, as it were, do indeed get the grease. Many will chalk up this behavior to being assertive, but in reality it's about covering proverbial backsides. The knock-on effect is that more junior members observe and subsequently adopt these behaviors--because this is seemingly "how it works" at Fahrenheit 212--and take them to other companies or, worse, have them seep into their day-to-day lives.