Overpriced, underpaid, and don't practice the values they preach - Anonymous employee Crema Employee Review

Your onboarding training will vary wildly depending on which craft you're assigned to and which project you end up on. For example: Some folks end up working hand-in-hand with a senior level contributor or the director of their craft (ie dev, design, test, or product management) for months and consequently receive promotions and praise because of the leadership visibility into their growth, while other brand new folks will get dumped onto projects with minimal training, little assistance, and then--without much direct leadership insight into what's actually happening on those projects--won't receive adequate recognition for their achievements or will be blamed for anything that doesn't go perfectly. For a company that loves to boast more than 40% of their team are women, there's rampant sexism on both the interpersonal and the professional levels. On the smaller end of the scale are microaggressions where male leadership get away with calling women inappropriate pet names (think: "honey") or telling them to smile more during Zoom calls. On the larger end, women who ask for help from leadership may be ignored and gaslit about past communications. I saw and experienced multiple instances in different projects where a woman's work was credited solely to a male colleague, and nobody would speak up. The scariest thing I witnessed: the day after an HR case was opened to investigate sexism from several male managers against a contributor-level woman, the company fired the ("alleged") victim without interviewing her, without warning , then continued to "investigate" the issue, told employees they could not discuss the (alleged) issues they'd witnessed (which is a violation of EEOC protections of employee speech!), then wrapped up the case by finding no fault from the company or its male leadership and immediately firing the woman who'd initially reported the (alleged) sexism she'd witnessed happening to the (alleged) victim. Both before and after this incident there has been a trend of women leaving this company, and this is happening for a reason. They grew far too quickly last year, and hired folks into leadership who had zero background in technology companies or Agile methodologies, and who consequently did not understand the actual day-to-day jobs that their direct reports were doing, couldn't provide assistance when needed, and were quick to report "performance problems" from even high performing individuals when there were bumps in the road from clients. There's a big culture of promoting "psychological safety" and "transparency," and then leadership can and will weaponize employee vulnerabilities against them. Crema is known for being on the higher end of hourly pricing among digital agencies, so it's also fairly abysmal how poorly they pay many of their employees—especially women—at 30-50% less than current market value. They also have a history of iffy opaque business practices around having individual contributors working on multiple client projects simultaneously when at least one of their clients might be getting billed for "full time" hours for that contributor's time.