I am actually disappointed in my past coworkers; very few to none of the people who spent significant time and energy at Illustria have written reviews. I can understand their decision of retrospective defeated passiveness, however I personally do not feel comfortable watching new hires brought into their position at Illustria and slowly start to grasp the situation around them. Please, interviewees; proceed with caution. I have compiled a list of a few of Illustria’s largest issues I feel are important to understand (emphasis on “a few of the largest issues” as I could talk for hours about all of the things wrong at this company, but I know you are only willing to read so much):
Awkward, tense company culture. Illustria jumped from being a startup in which everyone worked on the same level basically, to a very defined/strict corporate structure extremely quickly. This combined with other major pain areas (a couple of which listed below) cause a plethora of social issues. At their core, everyone at Illustria is a decent person and I appreciate all of them individually. However, in a corporate environment it is clear there is zero professional chemistry and tensions just keep getting higher. This distress is only multiplied with the lack of communication skills and corporate experience among the whole group.
Management. The biggest pain point. Since Illustria is a small startup you will undoubtedly interact with the executives even in your first few weeks. Whether it is watching them give a 50-slide powerpoint on Illustria’s internal company culture and how they are defining it for us, or when you get fed up watching all of the malpractice going on around you and you speak up for the first time with the naive optimism that management is receptive to feedback. Management constantly use the corporate structure and their positions of power to nitpick and manipulate employees into appearing as the bad guys in meetings for asking the harder but important and reasonable questions, expressing frustrations/concerns, or even just poking legitimate holes and bringing up potential problems in their underdeveloped initiatives. An encyclopedia case of how power makes people blind to their own mistakes while penalizing subordinates for theirs. The Executives are so wrapped up in this company and the tense situation in this tiny, little, insignificant bubble that they can no longer be objective nor understand any other perspective but their own.
Uninformed decision making. Huge decisions are often made in a panic; quickly with little in-depth research or projections. The management team have to be strongly and frequently reminded to take more time developing, thinking through, and finalizing their “big picture” ideas before actual implementation. Management routinely replies with “but we are” even though their actions say the opposite. The proof is shown strongly in the results. As in; the lack of positive results or progress/improvement at all, only short term “bandaids” and an ever growing list of internal problem areas. Over time this lack of results and frequent disrespect to design department employees creates a distrust between management and basically the entire rest of the company. In my year at Illustria I was directly told “you will just have to trust us in our decision making” 3 times when asking questions that, objectively, the executives of the company should know (EX: what the function and structure of an existing department is). Continuously requesting trust while doing nothing to deserve/recover it is unreasonable and a nearly impossible request to fulfill after a certain level of frustration has been passed.
No clear direction. Every department is striving for a different goal, some contradicting opposites. Each time I poked for a “Common Company Goal” time and time again I was given the simple answer “growth.” Not a specific kind of growth, just growth. Having such an unclear and profit-chasing company-wide goal not only leaves each person/department to interpret it their own way, but having a company mission of “growth” is obviously just very underdeveloped.
Unstable environment. The worst illustration of this is how Illustria throws you into the thick of it your first day after 4 hours of onboarding. They expect you to either sink or swim, hoping you will retain and immediately process the mass amount of confusing and ill-prepared information that was just thrown at you. The longer you are at the company the more your responsibilities snowball. The responsibilities pile up so high that you are eventually wearing a humanly impossible amount of hats at this company until you collapse and politely rage quit like so many before (leaving many hats unworn behind you, never to be picked up again). There is an increased feeling of instability due to lack of experience among the entire company and the lack of research and development before implementation of business initiatives (please see “Uninformed decision making” paragraph). Additionally, your job title, description, and responsibilities at Illustria will change frequently with little to no warning and you will be expected to accept these changes no matter what with zero change in compensation. This would not be so frightening if management were not increasingly getting further and further away from the day-to-day and inter-personal professional relationships at their own company.
Inhumanity towards employees. Illustria will try to trick you to save money any chance they get (gotta make up for that fancy new downtown DC office rent). This is especially problematic since all of the employees do not have enough corporate experience to see the tricks coming and lose in the long run, unable to recognize or call out the unprofessional injustices. I shouldn’t get into details about particular examples, however I will say that the decision maker at Illustria lacks the perspective to fully understand that these paychecks are not just money the company is losing, but in fact employees’ -- HUMANS’ -- entire livelihoods. I believe this decision maker lacks a lot of important perspectives and skills that are required to be a quality leader, but I digress.
Finally, some design-specific points:
Company-wide craftsmanship. I know as a production designer I am bias here, but creativity/conceptualizing is held high, high, HIGH above production and craftsmanship at Illustria. This is an issue since a populous of the group have no professional experience and have never worked under anyone to learn basic industry standards. Mistakes go out to clients constantly. In the past year the talent at Illustria has skyrocketed and each designer shows their own initiative, teaching themselves and each other new information, however the discipline of craftsmanship is not a high priority on anyone's radar. Stepping back, honestly it makes sense for this to be true at Illustria. Developing designers are interested in bigger things than nitty-gritty, to no fault of their own. On top of that the clients are asking for cheap quick creative work, so naturally they are not paying for enough time for double checking. These two factors combined make for a cycle in which production skills and attention to details are just not valued.
Lack of leadership and mentoring. I guess this was inevitable since every employee is straight-out-of-college.
***TLDR**
If you are dead set on taking this job I will offer you my advice: Live your time at Illustria wisely. You will be moved around and treated as a pawn, but it is possible to come out the other end a better designer. Create what you can in your time there, save up a couple portfolio pieces, teach yourself things along the way (since there is no mentorship), and when you are starting to feel a little jaded about your work step back and rethink your position at this company. Time and time again I saw good people staying in their position for far too long for their mental health. Additionally, (and I personally found this one difficult to avoid since I enjoy being at least semi social at work, which inevitably ropes you in); stay out of the politics. Working to improve particular things at Illustria has repeatedly proven to be a dead end road that you always swear you see a good turn coming up, but no, that was just a mirage created by your own blind optimism.
