Pros
- The first year of my time at UEGroup was honestly good. As an early career designer, I felt as though I was learning a lot. Because UEG is a small company, you get to do a lot of different things as a designer, even going so far as to be able to present to key stakeholders within client companies within a short amount of time. - There is care and thought put into the office space and culture. The office is neat, modern, and colorful. There are good snacks and drinks. During lunch, we would sit at the main table and eat together. It was a really good location, being located in Downtown Willow glen, which meant there were lots of good restaurants up and down the strip. - There were some good perks, such as working a hybrid schedule, and having lunch catered for us once a week. There were also fun events organized for people, especially if we had a remote worker coming in from out of town, we would do happy hours. One of our most recent company events was at the beginning of the year, when everyone went to Las Vegas. - The company is mostly comprised of women. This was a pro for me, personally. It was cool to look around and see other women who were working in the same field. - Clear goals and Levels for employment. This is not something that I see often in small companies, but there was clear documentation for skills that were expected of each person within each level and title.
Cons
- Lack of senior staff. While this wasn’t a problem earlier on, slowly, but surely, during the time I was working at UEG, senior staff began leaving the company for one reason or another. I wasn’t entirely sure what the effort was to hire more of them, but the result is that most of the people at the company had been working there for only a year. One particular instance is when the senior research manager left the company. The company was never able to replace her, which I believe eventually lead to 11 people leaving in the span of 6 months. While this might not be a big number, at the time, it was about half the total company size. - Over drafting of timelines and resources. When the senior research manager left the company, I believe that management began giving the remaining researchers work that they were not trained for nor were they given the proper time and resources to do. The issue was that the Senior Research Manager was a fantastic, capable person, who managed no less than 5, but usually closer to 10 projects at any given time. When she left, the remaining people were interns or new hires who only had 1-2 years of experience. Mistakes began to happen. And people who were asking for more time and more direction either left from working 60-hour weeks or were being laid off. After all had been said and done, the research side of the company had been whittled down until it was only one person. This did happen at times with the design side of the company, but it wasn’t as egregious as with the research side of the company. - Lack of diverse domains and projects. While this isn’t something that is necessarily management’s fault, Most of the work we did was within the military domain for one client. occasionally, a different project would come in and it would be a nice break, but the main work was within one domain. - Promotions didn’t feel fair at times. While I suppose this might happen at most companies, because UEG is so small, I expected that promotions would be based on merit rather than other factors. I have mentioned before that UEG has a clear list of skills you have to attain before you get promoted but from my experience, you won’t necessarily get promoted even if you go above and beyond these items. It felt to me, personally, that promotions were being divvied out to balance out the intense imbalance in the hierarchy of the organization, as most people who worked at UEG at the time had been working for only a year or two. There may have also been not enough money at the time to promote everyone, even if they deserved it.