Pros
Amazing coworkers who I forged a real sense of camaraderie with. Truly some of the most talented people I've ever worked with across all departments. For a time, I felt like we were in a golden age where we were getting interesting work and loved working with one another. I honestly looked forward to coming to work every day.
Cons
None of the Pros apply anymore because almost everyone has since left. The bulk of the company was originally LBi's New York office, but has gone through a series of mergers and acquisitions starting about 2 years ago, resulting in a change in management. The new managers (from a smaller company, MRY, which LBi acquired) were now tasked with running the larger combined firm (which they rebranded with the name of their old firm). Yeah, you basically need a diagram to understand how all of this happened. In short, it's been an unmitigated disaster. They had no idea how half the office worked or what type of work they should be pursuing. This resulted in a large round of layoffs of employees whose roles they didn't fully understand, and were then shocked to find that we were understaffed for our scheduled workloads as a result. This triggered a process of rapid atrophy of the workforce, both from people seeing the writing on the walls and jumping ship while they could, as well as additional ill-advised layoffs. Inside of a year, the office went from needing to buy out another floor of the building to accommodate all of the employees, to having enough room to share their existing space with Big Fuel and still having room to spare. Incidentally, the new floor was never renovated or made ready, but management have been happy to pay the rent on it for coming up on 2 years now with no actual purpose for the space. Because that's obviously a better investment than retaining employees who are doing work. Hanging over all of this has been the massive lack of clear communication from the C-level exec team. Promises are made and constantly broken. Execs who promise a plan and a way forward promptly leave within weeks of telling us to stay. Entire departments have vanished overnight with little warning, leaving others scrambling to cover their work, at least temporarily, until all of the work dried up due to many major clients fleeing once they got a peek behind the curtain. But hey, there's free coffee, and look at how goofy the office is in the videos we post to social media. Bread and circuses.