Pros
Rare mid-size family culture, solid industry reputation and connection network, loyal returning clients, clean and neat structure/system, learning and social opportunities, personal attention from higher management, and slightly-above city average pay & full benefits.
Cons
The awful server. It was a different level of 10-month long daily inconvenience during my time. The incompetent server was causing issues from serous lagging, crashing, file loss, to office shut-downs; people were affected to a point where no one could work for half of a day. Words were the company could have spent more money on choosing a more reliable server company to invest in long term quality work instead of being cheap. Individual-based management styles vary. Some senior project managers were reliant on how many projects they could bring in and decide to be extremely rude and condescending to lower-level designers/architects. There was a case where a project manager was physically controlling a junior designer like a puppet on how to do a CD set correctly (while he himself does not even know how to use Revit) by yelling straight from the top of her skull and in a highly condescending tone in the middle of the office. Personally, I was talked to very inconsiderately multiple times by a project manager who had been with the company for a long time. No one on the spot would say anything. The most obvious reaction I saw was a manager physically leaving the scene so she wouldn’t be involved in any of this lecture-like talk down. Seniority could be played badly or well depending on who you work with among the two studios. Corporate style decisions on layoffs, paycuts, and schedule changes. I was laid off cold and given only 30 minutes from private announcement to waking out the doors without being allowed to say goodbye.
