I work as a graphic designer at a small agency that predominantly deals with a fairly niche industry (not going to say what industry as there's not many agencies who deal in it and I might – who knows – get fired).
In the five-person team are three directors, the son of one of the directors and me.
I've been there for almost 3 years and I think I'm good at what I do.
Money is tight right now due to issues in the niche industry – I'm on not far over minimum wage despite having 9 years design experience (in fact a recruiter recently laughed at my salary and told me – like I didn't know already /s – that it was “shit”.)
When I started they had a digital marketing apprentice, and virtually as soon as she graduated and became a full-time team member that's when the directors began telling her that her work wasn't good enough, micro-managing her work and making her life a misery. Eventually she jumped ship to a bigger agency and now she's working with one of the top ones in the country.
I'm a generalist designer, so I'm good with all of the creative cloud inc after effects and dimension etc. The son of the director mainly deals in websites, although he did 3d at uni. His workload consists of pretending to work and he struggles to come up with something plausible for his to-do list every morning in our teams chat.
I've got a pretty full workload, but recently I've had one of the other directors (not my creative director) stick his oar in and demand I send him across the work I'm doing. He doesn't bother to look at the briefs, just likes to tell me that I'm doing things wrong. One thing he has also started doing is making me continually tweak certain aspects of the designs that I'm doing, then, after I've sent everything through to him, he'll bin them, do his own work which is nowhere near as good and send that across to the client instead – and he doesn't tell me he's done it, he just waits until I find out. He's done this three times, as well as completely butcher a motion video I did last year that I'm still livid about.
He's so bloody arrogant and the other two directors are letting him do it, complicit in their silence. I've had a lot of stuff going on in family life that has little impact on my work life – and I do make the hours up if necessary. But they've done it to one already, and now they're doing it to me. I'm trying to get out but I'm getting overlooked by recruiters due to my wage and possibly age, so most likely I'll be heading back to retail where the wages are higher.
Cheers for reading.