Possibilties to learn and great coworkers but very difficult work environment
Pros
Be prepared to do more landscape and interior work instead of architecture as it is a small office working in an already architecturally saturated and competitive city. The common design process of the office consists of creating multitude of iterations, which can leave little time to develop and present a finally chosen design. The office itself is a lovely bright space and with a great connecition via public transport. As a relatively small and starting office, some systems were not at the time firmly in place resulting in lack of program licenses and other IT related problems. Positives: it was possible to be involved in different parts of the design from initial design development and model making to detail drawings and render images and in that respect it was possible to learn a decent amount. Coworkers were mostly very lovely and supportive, the leading architects were creative and showed great skill and care for the design process.
Cons
The office had an extremely toxic work environment, where working over time was expected and minimally but majority of the time not at all compensated. Working over the weekends was not uncommmon and could be enforced with only a day's notice. Raised voices from the leading architects at the employees were not uncommon and negative criticism about one's work were at times delievered in an unprofessional manner and did also sometimes turn into personal comments and physical acts of frustration for example slamming one's hand against the table. The leaders of the office are clever in design but lack severely in team leading and people skills. Stream of employees was rapid with workers coming and leaving within a couple of months, or even weeks, causing chaos in design process, file organization and work flow. The offered salary was not competative at the time.
