Pros
The design team was made up of incredibly talented and kind people. Design management still works on projects that the rest of their team works on so they can empathize with the problems that designers face day to day. There is an ‘unlimited’ PTO policy and it actually equates to employees being able to take a lot of PTO, sick and mental health days. The whole company also generally takes the week between Christmas and New Year off as well, which is wonderful. Siege took very good care of its employees throughout the pandemic, even offering a small bonus to employees whose spouses or family members lost their jobs. The company is fully remote and as a designer, you are trusted to get your work done and are not micromanaged.
Cons
I’m still a bit shocked that I’m writing this review and even more so that I have left. If you had asked me a year ago I would have had zero plans to leave. Siege was the oasis of design jobs and I would have recommended it to anyone. We worked on interesting projects, had a fast but realistic schedule, and leadership was very transparent and caring. Even though Siege is a content marketing agency first, design still felt like an integral part of the company. Cut to the present day where designer morale is at an all-time low and we work at a completely different agency than we did even 1 year ago. Of the 30+ designers, only 1 had quit from the time I started up to this year. But so far in 2022, they have lost 8, with more planning to leave. There used to be a variety of clients with a mix of styles which kept the job engaging. Due to increased pricing a lot of the long haul, fun clients have dropped leaving a group of uninteresting tech, finance, and insurance clients. Over the last few months, there has been a very obvious shift to deprioritize design across the board by pitching quicker projects and fewer infographics. Very recently, project timelines were cut drastically, making for less creative work and increases the number of projects that are expected to be churned out per week. Designers are always pumping out the quickest and most finalized thing possible, leading to an extremely burnt-out team. Implementing the pod structure has been the fatal blow to designer happiness. Rigidity among scheduling the few interesting clients has left the majority of the team stuck with clients that are unfulfilling and frankly very boring with no escape. The proposed solution to this after nearly a year of complaints has been to let designers work on any client within their pod, which doesn’t help the pods where every client is uninteresting. The pod structure has also hindered the ability to assign designers projects based on their skill set and wants, leaving the decisions to be made based on what is convenient for marketing schedules. Designers who are incredibly talented illustrators are assigned clients to source stock photos. Decisions that drastically change the work-life of designers are made behind closed doors, with little to no input from design managers. Feedback provided by employees directly after new processes are announced is disregarded by upper management and designers are told 'to just give it some time and be positive', only to have those same issues grow into huge problems. When providing feedback to design managers you get the feeling that they are unhappy as well and are struggling to make feedback heard or create any positive change. When discussing problems in exit interviews blame is pushed to road blocks by investors that the team at large barely knows exists. The ability of the investors to hinder the CEO or COO from running things how they would like or influence decision-making has not been mentioned publicly. In general, there is little-to-no design collaboration and the job feels draining and isolating. The goal is always to have as little feedback or back-and-forth as possible on any project. Everyone is maxed out and there is no time or energy to collaborate in the small ways you can in agency life. There is only enough time to translate the brief as quickly as possible and move on to your next assignment.