The sad part is...I did read the reviews before accepting a job here
Pros
•Laid back atmosphere/nice office •Occasional free samples •Reasonable work-life balance (and that's because the cheap skate management does everything they can in order to not pay for overtime). •One of the very toxic/controlling/contradicting senior level managers has resigned! More of this throughout the company needs to happen!!!
Cons
LOCATION •Sonoma county may be beautiful, but it is essentially still considered to be the boonies. It's hard for the company to recruit experienced people because of location (and pay...more on this below) MANAGEMENT •Composed of unapproachable, disingenuous, unsupportive, down talking/condescending/patronizing, consistently contradicting & TOXIC team of know-it-all's who become threatened the moment anyone beneath them shows any amount of evidence that they might know more than they do. (Note: this is not exclusive to just my department) •Positive reinforcement is mostly non existent. If any kind of a compliment is given, then it's done so in a patronizing manner. •Most of the appointed team leaders within in the last 5 years or less don't even have the necessary technical training or years of experience prior to getting their promotions as supervisors (whatever they know how to do now was learned on the job...which I suppose means that they have the right to parade around like know-it-alls). •Advancement is purely based on how far you're willing to crawl up a senior level mangers arse and where you rank on their nepotism-meter. PROCESS •Archaic way of doing things. Tech packs are built in Excel while their competitors use more efficient/sophisticated tools like PLM. •No ownership of product category. Set up is so that everyone takes turns working on a style & so that you are not working on the same style over & over again. And if the next sample comes in worse than before? That gets blamed on whoever wrote the last comments. •Employee purchase process is a joke. Although the discount is good, the means in which to buy their stuff is archaic (manually fill out a paper form, put it in the processors inbox & wait up to a month at times before you receive your order). PAY/BENEFITS/PERKS •Most are non-exempt pay status (again, not limited to those in my dept), meaning that you have to clock in/clock out as if you work at McDonalds. •EXTREMELY poor pay rates. Let me put it this way...the higher ups were willing to fork over 5 million bucks for a controversial Super Bowl commercial that promoted a form of bigotry, yet won't let you negotiate a livable wage @ the beginning of the hiring process that matches the EXCESSIVELY HIGH COST OF LIVING in the Bay Area.