Pros
The employers are genuinely nice people who I would be happy to go out for lunch with and chat. The work the company does is very good, and they've won a lot of awards for their work (though the employees don't get thanked much for this). The managers really do care about what the company does and it's clear that they have a passion for making quality design for people. I personally actually like that they do employee reviews every 3 months. It seems kind of much, but it was the only time that I really got feedback about how they felt about the work I was doing, and I really appreciated having that feedback.
Cons
The employers say they want the company to be like a family, and that sounds great, but it more often than not ends up being a parent vs. young child dynamic in the way that they create odd rules and micromanage their employees' time. It feels more like being at a strict school than being an adult at work. The employees are expected to do so many different tasks throughout the day that there are times it's impossible to finish everything, even if working at top efficiency. Think of having 12 hours worth of constant work to do and only 8 hours to do it. That's what every day feels like here. I had several days where I was there hours after closing time, not because I didn't use my time wisely, but because there was some terrible twist in the schedule and/or other people not meeting their schedules for the project. The management lets certain clients walk all over them and the employees, causing a lot of unnecessary stress and extra work, which the company does not get paid for, and therefore does not get passed on to the employees in the form of a decent salary. One project was billed at 40 hours of work, but I know that we spent more than 120 hours on it because I timed ONLY MYSELF at 120 hours, and the other designers all spent a lot of time on the project as well. We got paid for 40 hours and spent 200+ total hours on the project. This was not because of poor time management on our part, but because the client came back with so many tweaks, changes, delayed in getting us assets that we needed from them, changed the scope of the project multiple times, etc. That's fine, but it should be part of the quote in the first place. We can't pop out one page every hour, especially not great pages that won't need any edits or changes at all. There are basically no benefits to speak of, so your salary is it, and the salary isn't even enough to live in the area comfortably. You either have to commute for (sometimes literally) hours in and out of the crowded Tyson's Corner or pay more than half your monthly salary to have a small apartment with several other people that's even decently close to work. There's no health insurance (there is $100/mo set aside for you to help pay for your own individual insurance, though it's not nearly, NEARLY enough to really offset the cost of individual insurance, which can be $500 or more a month, easily). The only reason I could afford being in this place is because I got a crazy cheap living deal with a friend and lived in a communal house with 6 other people. If I had found a "normal" place to live I would seriously have had to take on another part-time job to make up the difference. The turnover rate for employees is insane, and NOT normal. By the time I got the job, all the employees who were pictured on the website were gone and there were three other designers there instead. By the time I left, a year after I started there, another employee had been fired. The other two that I worked with left shortly after I did. The employee that was hired right before I left to replace the girl who got fired ALSO left within about a year. Nobody can put up with this place for long, I'm afraid. It's a shame, because I really do want GRAPHEK to be a good and successful company. I hope they are able to change soon and really be a great place to work.