I’ll just start by saying that I’m extremely happy with what I do now. The work is fulfilling, the pay is decent, and the people are mostly great to work with.
Like the subject line says, it’s been a little over a decade and I’m starting to think my last place of employment has given me literal PTSD, no joke. I’m going to try to limit myself but there’s no way this won’t be a tldr:former workplace so toxic that I still have nightmares a decade after leaving, still feel my heart race and my blood pressure rise when I see something that reminds me of that place.
To be fair, there were some pros. Some of this list are positive attributes for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways, but they’re positives nonetheless.
I learned so much here, probably more than anywhere else in my career. Both concrete and soft skills. I learned that my limitations were not what I previously thought they were. A few years of excellent experience for which I am grateful.
I got to work with a cadre of the most talented, brilliant, and creative people I've ever met or worked with. Great brains to pick. They taught me a lot about my camera, among other things.
It's a paycheck, and it won't bounce (although I sometimes felt nervous early on). I was working here during the subprime mortgage crisis and recession. Reasonable degree of Job Security during the subprime mortgage crisis due to underbidding myself and having inappropriate responsibilities abusively heaped upon me.
The one and only deadline I ever failed to hit (in my entire 20 year career so far, knock on wood…) was taken surprisingly well (considering how willing and ready my superiors always were to crucify me by fire with no mercy over the slightest mistake or no mistake at all, just using me as a scapegoat).
Wearing many different hats, even though it was employee abuse, kept it fresh. I get bored easily.
There was about a mile of walking built into every work day with transferring between the trains I had to ride. I sure could use that today.
But there were many, many more reasons to leave, which i probably should have done sooner. An atmosphere of constant crisis and disapproval was established and maintained. Any questions about how this helps productivity were met with accusations of not being on board with the team and generally seen as a threat to the inner circle’s illusion of omniscience and omnipotence. answering these questions would require sharing information, the concealment of which gives the inner circle considerable advantages over the rest of the employees.
I started with good self image and no serious health problems. I left with high blood pressure, alcoholism (4 years sober now), a sharp increase in nicotine dependence, depression, and anxiety (for which I am now receiving treatment). Part of me quitting was that I felt pretty confident that if I continued I’d have a heart attack by the time I was 40. My perception of the world and myself was objectively changed for the worse. Since my time here I no longer feel the employee/employer relationship is viable and employers cannot be trusted with the livelihood my family and I need. I have since found other ways to procure resources, and will no longer work for just one employer at a time unless I have no other choice (which I have learned there usually are alternatives, they can just be hard to see).
There was always a steady stream of lies from the inner circle; I'll limit myself to just one strong example. After telling every employee they'd be reviewed soon (at a point when we were about 6 months overdue), he told us “We're gonna talk first thing next week, you're gonna be happy, we want you to be happy” when he knew he was about to take a weeklong vacation in Mexico but hadn’t told any of us. This occurred on a Friday evening (after I had worked until 5am Thursday in fact), and on the train home I coincidentally bumped into a producer and the office manager, who told me he's out of the office next week; the actual reviews/raises were not to take place until about a month after this. He lied straight faced, right to our faces, right through his teeth. When our reviews finally transpired 5 weeks later, nobody that I was aware of got their now 7 months overdue raises retroactively. They were not shy about lying about anything and everything. Sometimes Inconsequential lies from which they had nothing to gain, which led me to think that it was perhaps pathological.
Over time an overall pattern of Lacking priorities and vision for their company emerged. We were regularly asked to review the pertinent training materials but there was never actual time allotted to do it. When I had down time and started training, inevitably someone would swing by and tell me to do their job for them or clean up some idiot mess they made, because I was “just training.” They never funded an employee taking a class, that I am aware of. Another great example, there were a couple of “clients,” they would show up somewhere in the ballpark of 1-3 times per year, essentially with their palms up. They'd throw some flowery language at the owner and ask for some free work. This sent the inner circle into hysterics about how important it was to impress these chowderheads due to their promises of future work. This happened periodically the entire time I was with them. At the time that I left this place, we had produced exactly one free wedding video and one free printed sign for one of these guys. A wedding video.
Hours: 3 yr avg roughly 50/wk─not too bad. HOWEVER, the day-to-day schedule was totally unpredictable. A manager popping by my desk at 5:15pm on Friday to inform me that I’d be working late that night and all weekend was not uncommon. It was in fact a 40 (12/14/14) hour weekend that tore it for me. We busted our ass on this project that actually never ended up seeing the light of day, wouldn’t you know it. We had the help of a freelancer that was charging emergency rate $150 an hour to write html/CSS code. And while I was thankful to have the help, I was sitting there with my coworker, both of us doing the same work as he was for what would have worked out to less than minimum wage for that weekend. We were offered no extra reward of any kind, and when I asked for one the general manager laughed in my face. When I came in on Monday, the owner said to do these couple things and I could just bolt for the day, and when one of the other producers learned I was about to leave she started trying to get me to do her chores for her. I almost had to fight with her to make good on the bosses promise. It was right after that that I put in my notice.
I bid myself lower than I should have and had to live with shitty pay while working there─no one else's fault but my own, I completely get that. I bid in good faith thinking it would be an opportunity for improvement and upward mobility. After almost 3 years of working there, yes I got a few raises but still never got anywhere near median industry standard nor a living wage for Chicago. In the future I will decide what I want to ask for with the assumption that it won't change very much regardless of seniority, effort, or performance. Or pretty much any other (probably secret) measure of merit. I will never again accept any salaried position without clearly defined parameters outlining my emergency rate of pay (probably 2x normal salary measured hourly is reasonable), what timeframe of notice triggers this rate (48 hours or less is reasonable), and any restrictions I may need on working OT on certain days or times of the year. And I will not accept any verbal agreement on these parameters. I will Insist on getting it in writing and keep a copy. If you're freelancing, you should already be doing this but here's your reminder. If they refuse, don't walk away. Run. There's a reason they're refusing.
My pay was low if measured hourly. I was pulling in somewhere in the ballpark of $15-$20/hr depending on the week, which is pretty terrible for Chicago.
They never had a real payroll in the 3 years I worked there. The checks were cut by hand by the owner. Payday was once a month and the date drifted from one month to the next, the 4th, the 2nd, the 6th, the only thing you could rely on is that they wouldn't be early. They never offered direct deposit while I was working there. My check never bounced either, to be fair, although I sometimes felt nervous early on.
I got baited and switched for what I was told would be my duties at the interview vs. what my responsibilities actually were (as did most or all of my colleagues). Job descriptions are left intentionally ambiguous without clearly defined responsibilities, thus leaving the door open for the higher ups to commit labor abuses. There is a sizable list of duties I was asked to take on that did not fit my job description, some above and some below my pay grade. I never claimed to have any amount of competency in these areas or asked for these to be my job. For example IT and programming. They wanted to hire someone with a degree in computer information systems/programming but didn't want to pay for it. Artists are probably easier to exploit. They wanted full fledged application development, but wanted it done with JavaScript, actionscript, and director lingo, and weren’t willing to spend the time and money to train us nor equip us with a real app dev environment (which I wouldn’t have known what to do with anyway). I’m a digital artist who happens to know his way around a few lines of code and under the hood of the machine, not a computer scientist who happens to know a bit of design & animation. There was also a lot of menial labor I was tasked with that was not appropriate to my job description. Should've been handled by an intern.
After a few years of working there, a stipulation forbidding us from freelancing was added to our contract. There were several employees who were already freelancing when this was introduced… I'm pretty sure they just continued to do it. We were told we'd receive permission in writing which never materialized.
I saw several employees fired frivolously. I overheard some comments about those employees after they left that truly disgusted me, and believe me when I say I don't go out of my way to hear gossip in the office. A lot of employees also essentially fled/fired the bosses, bringing the turnover rate into the ballpark of fast food. I knew if I didn’t make it a point to quit that I also would be fired for no real reason.
Within a few months of starting here, I was regularly sending out resumes to area production houses, other workplaces in unrelated fields, and places outside the state. We were in a pretty major recession for these years due to the subprime mortgage crisis. Eventually I just said screw it and quit anyway. After freelancing for a while I found more permanent work as the economy was swinging back into gear. Waiting around here was an obvious invitation to be fired frivolously in one of their emotional outbursts, thus robbing me of three years of work experience on my resume—and these guys cannot be trusted to say something positive when a potential future employer asks about me. Get references in writing. That’s what I did. If future employers call them asking about me and they don't have anything positive to say, I have two written letters from their own managers that say otherwise. I recommend you do the same.
After a year or two working there, the inner circle stopped introducing us to new hires. It felt like, the superiors’ attitudes had shifted to, “the employees are completely disposable.” I have inside information that after our meetings, they would go back to their offices snickering and deriding us, with comments such as “we told those idiots we’re all family! They’ll stick around for another few months at least!” and, “We just tell them what they want to hear to placate them!” I was told I’d be taken out to lunch for my 1 year. Never happened. I deliberately didn’t bring up my 2 year just to see if anyone noticed. They didn’t. After a series of hired sales people that proved themselves to be miserable failures, they routinely yanked the rug out from under the one and only sales guy that ever worked out well during my time there-letting him do all the footwork and heavy lifting for the sales he was grooming and then swoop in at the last second to close it, thus denying him the commission he had rightfully earned. Really brilliant considering how much money this guy was bringing in. You'd think they would want to keep him. The company owed him 5 figures when he left. I don't know if he was ever paid for these stolen commissions.
PTO, even if requested months in advance, never failed to generate some kind of unnecessary drama. Sometimes, unintentionally picking the wrong moment to walk over to 7-11 for coffee & snacks generated some unnecessary drama.
The super-white-male-right-wing-osity of the leadership can feel unsafe to, well, pretty much anyone who isn’t a cis white male, like women and those of alternative lifestyles such as LBGTQ+. There were only three employees in my 3 years there who were not white. One of which didn’t last very long (it could be that his work just plain sucked, I don’t really know). Every once in a while I caught some… comments… I’m not going out of my way to hear office gossip, I assure you. Let’s just say that, “ gosh, that African-American family over there sure does look well dressed and successful,” was not a phrase that you would expect to hear out of their mouths. █████ emailed all employees while I was working there telling us how he wanted us to vote. He also had choice comments for that year's winning democrats that he shared via email.
█████ is such a ridiculous annoying jock. Our team meetings often felt like locker room pep-talks. That’s █████ way of trying to inspire and motivate the crew, but most of us found it annoying or uncomfortable. A few actually found it disturbing. Did you ever get the fuck you pay me speech? That was a real gem of a meeting. Did it feel threatening? If you tried to talk about it, were you made out to be the problem? Did you come away from the conversation feeling as though you'd done something wrong? He had fuck you pay me slides in his PowerPoint. █████ is weirdly and inappropriately competitive. He will horn in on the photographer's best shots so he can shoot the good stuff and leave the B roll to the little people. He is possessive of the projects most important to him. He will push employees over to a less important project or something menial if he doesn’t like them or feels threatened by their talent without a second thought. One day we could all hear him melting down about some sort of lawsuit. The entire office could hear him shouting phrases such as “F**(K THEM! THEY'RE GONNA SUE ME?!”
Inner circle are all vocally anti-union. The crew could hypothetically organize but everybody would have to be onboard all at once, and unfortunately it would have to be handled delicately and covertly at least for a while, and every barrier possible should be expected as soon as █████ learns of the intent. Out of curiosity, I spent a few weekend afternoons lunching with a regional media industry union rep, ultimately deciding it would be too painful and brutal and I’d probably get [yes, illegally, I know] fired for engaging in a fight that I didn’t really know I even wanted on my plate. But if this crew organized…. Well they’d probably just sell the whole shebang to the highest bidder. Or just burn it to the ground. Who knows. Maybe the crew already has unionized, but I’d be totally shocked. You may not think highly of unions either and I am not trying to downplay their flaws. But, you can wait around with your fingers crossed, relying on your hopefully benevolent employer to reward your hard work and provide your livelihood, or, you can band together and negotiate your contract as a unified group through a lawyer trained in doing just that. Which do you think is the better plan?
Their willingness to expose their own company to legal liability shocked me at times. Some of their practices were a little south of legal. I'm fairly sure that suggesting to your employees how they should vote is not legal, and █████ did it in writing. I know they were using some stock assets and more software licenses then they paid for during my time there. If you know the industry, you know that it's normal for a production house or animation studio in a time crunch to grab a piece of “trial” ware needed to complete the immediate project and then quickly pay for it after the fact. This is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about These guys not wanting to pay for the assets and software they're using day in and day out for months and years. No, I didn't report them for any of this if you're wondering. Our stock music source changed when the previous one wouldn't let the █████ account download anything else. Please note that I always got what I was owed, albeit not always in a timely manner. And of course Landlords tend to be real punctual people, when it comes to collecting!
And seriously, this post is abbreviated, I’m not kidding. One last thing, I haven’t even gone into how bush league they were, but one big thing sticks out. The inner circle are absolutely not above hiring sock puppets (or just doing it themselves) to covertly plant comments in their favor in the various online social media platforms. I watched them do it on more than one occasion. I was checking this place out on glassdoor thinking some of the positive job reviews there were a tad sus, but there's one in there that I'm certain was posted by █████. There'll been no activity there for years, but a one star review will appear, and then a couple months later a new 5 star review will conveniently appear directly refuting what They had to say and gushing about what a wonderful place █████ is to work at. If that fails, they'll fall back to directed personal attacks. Here is the most suspicious review i saw:
5.0
Former Employee
█████ is a great place to work.
█████ 2019 – Anonymous Employee
Recommend
CEO Approval
Business Outlook
Pros
My experience was incredibly positive. I learned more in a few months than i did in all of my time at school. I was surrounded by pros and learned something new almost every day.
On several occasions, my extra effort was rewarded with a bonus. It made me feel like I was appreciated. Leadership was mostly positive and always fair.
I’ve read a couple of negative reviews and I’m bewildered. In my opinion, █████ offers creatives like me with incredible opportunities.
The more I excelled, the more responsibilities I was given. If you had a negative experience, it might be your fault.
My two cents.
Cons
– Like any creative agency, sometimes the hours were long.
– Sometimes, you may have to work weekends.
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