The lowest morale of any company I've worked at after almost twenty years in the industry at various top-flight branding and advertising agencies. Turnover is incredibly high, with a surprising number of employees lasting less than a year. The five star reviews are rather blatantly written by HR ("Pros: Great work/life balance!! Cons: I guess they can kind of be perfectionists :("). The many reviews here describing the heads-down culture are accurate. Heads are down because everyone is utterly miserable and is trying not to be noticed by the same five or six backstabbing ogres who manage to derail every single project. Interviews take place with the same three people, carefully selected to project an illusion that you will be working with genuine humans, with no suggestion that you will never interact with them again. While the C-level employees are mostly respected veterans, they are all but completely inaccessible and largely checked out, cheerily and obliviously riding out the tail end of their boomer careers. Aggressive recruiting keeps a steady stream of new talent coming, but distant, odious, often laughably incompetent middle management keeps them leaving almost as quickly. Management actually has coined a name for this, "tissue rejection," which they seem to view with detached surprise or thinly-veiled denial, despite its clockwork regularity. A system of advisers with no clear role, rather than direct reporting, has been put in place to obfuscate the blame over personnel problems. Poor communication is an understatement; it is a genuine rarity to have any clue what's going on at all. All projects sail over budget and devolve into carefully choreographed finger-pointing as to who might possibly be to blame. They stubbornly refuse to hire project managers, calling themselves "creative-led," which is a word that translates to English as "painfully disorganized and consistently under-prepared." Any genuine creativity is quickly stamped out by the same two or three bullying philistines in the studio, and the vast majority of the work is openly acknowledged as nothing more than outright recycling from client to client. Several partners and senior associates are so personally and professionally repugnant that it's tempting to just name names. Most seem to survive through a delicately-maintained perception that the client could only ever be happy dealing with them alone, when in reality a whipping boy (or, more often, girl) is shouldering their burden just out of sight, laboring under the illusion that they will advance because of it. Promotions are an extreme rarity, and advancement seems to correspond directly to how many people one has smilingly hurled under the bus. This is the type of office where longevity is actually a red flag, with most long-term employees either deeply entrenched creators and maintainers of the negative culture or simply self-aware enough to realize that they're unfit to work anywhere better. Fear of not receiving a bonus or firing is the carrot and stick motivating everyone else. The lion's share of the work is done by interns or young designers who have briefly confused their lives with an episode of Mad Men. Endless lip service is given to the company's "rich history," which is apparently the euphemism you use when your best-known work is more than half a century old. Much of their current work has been harshly criticized within the design community (see ebay), and because of this they have—uproariously—talked themselves into the idea that they are misunderstood or somehow an underdog. They shamelessly try to take credit for several decades-old logos for which they are not actually the agency of record, and can't go more than a few sentences without trotting out the trivia that people who are no longer working there, or even alive, once designed the Campbell's Soup can, which they somewhat adorably seem to think is a claim to fame (it's also not even strictly true, pathetically). A seemingly unceasing amount of pretentious dithering goes into what they refer to as their "intellectual capital," which mostly amounts to ham-fisted pr attempts masquerading as amateurish industry prognostication.