• Long-term career options are limited. You can easily go from an analyst to a strategist and receive merit increases, but beyond that no other kinds of roles really exist other than management roles, which are very few and far between, and will be taken by employees who have been sticking around waiting for one to open up for 5+ years. This is more so an agency thing than anything else, though.
• Because of this, ROI does have a higher turnover rate than what you’ll experience at other non-agency companies. This can lead to friction with transitioned clients, and can be demoralizing to employees when many of their peers leave one after another. However, this should be expected at an agency.
• If you are an analyst, you will be paid hourly, which doesn’t necessarily promote efficiency. Many hourly employees (mostly analysts) will put in long hours doing useless extra busy work just to make a decent paycheck.
• Senior management can be challenging. They stay pretty removed from the goings-on of the individual contributors for a company of less than 200 people and are resistant to organizational/structural change unless there is significant outcry from the ICs. And even then, change is very slow to happen, though more has been happening recently, so this could spell a positive trend.
• A lot of your fate is based on luck of the draw of where you land. If you work in client services, you'll be paired up with a peer that you will work on ALL of your accounts with and will essentially learn everything from. New employees will only be as good as their more senior peer unless they actively seek knowledge out elsewhere. While most employees have good or at least professional relationships with their peer (which allows them to grow), some are not so lucky.
• There will be a ton of useless meetings that you’ll have to go to. Some days it isn’t a big deal but on days where you have a ton of work to get done, its frustrating.
• Work from home policy is one day a MONTH (you can get another one, but for extenuating circumstances). This is an extremely antiquated policy for a tech-forward company.