Pros
- Compensation is fair and appropriate, benefits are great. - Co-workers were fantastic, and I truly loved working with them every day. - WFH was great, and I appreciated the efforts made to create cohesion in a remote-hybrid work environment. Monthly after-work events were held by a committee and they were very fun. - TeeTurtle actively donates to a number of social justice organizations that provide aid for marginalized and at-risk individuals, and I very much appreciated that.
Cons
My mental health, work-life balance, and professional confidence suffered greatly during my employment here. This company is mainly concerned with two things: image and bottom line. The bottom line (the profit) is the most important, and if you get in the way of it, you won't last very long. Even if it is on behalf of many individual contributors/teams in hopes of improving internal operations to promote long-term scalability. • Unrealistic expectations with workloads and communication. — Workload: Creative team members are constantly inundated with more projects than they can reasonably handle with timelines they can’t realistically achieve, and a lot of time is wasted with daily reprioritization to meet the unreasonable demand. — Communication: One of TeeTurtle’s favorite sayings is “consider the why”— meaning, consider why someone is asking you a question and what information is most relevant to them to provide as an answer. This sounds great and thoughtful in theory. In practice? Because of a lack of information between departments (the “sink or swim” culture that causes constant cross-functional misalignment), leadership and individual contributors will often come up with different answers for “the why”, leading to frequent communication breakdowns. ICs are responsible for making important decisions with 50% of the information they need to do so, but are 100% responsible when the breakdowns occur. • Lack of accountability for leadership There is a general unwillingness for accountability measures or anything more than minor changes to workflows to hold both members of leadership and departmental leads accountable for unrealistic timelines/expectations or missed deadlines/deliverables. There is no safe or comfortable avenue for discussing challenges with other departmental leads or leadership TO leadership, and no clear picture of WHO exactly is supposed to be holding those leaders accountable when they aren’t following processes, delivering their project pieces, or communicating effectively. • Disorganization In short: is rampant. Teams are constantly shuffled and restructured, people given new titles, individual contributors switched from one lead or department to another because the creative teams are not growing at the same rate as the demand. These “restructures” attempt to redistribute the unreasonable volume of work without hiring more people, resulting in a LOT of stress and uncertainty. But the solution of "more people" is rarely considered. • Cliquey Other reviews have said it, I agree. There are certain people who have the CEO’s ear, and have far too much sway over decisions about things they are not actively involved in on a daily basis. This extends to who stays and who goes. Leadership does not apply equal weight between your peers’/direct reports’ experiences working with you and the clique’s opinion. I’d go as far as to say they don’t consider the former at all. Other reviews have mentioned the startling way terminations occur. I agree. Little to no information is given to the rest of the team when it happens, and it creates a lot of fear and uncertainty for individual contributors. Great people with years of experience and phenomenal work ethic were let go, seemingly on a whim or a bad day. • HR I cannot say I fully understood what the HR department did while I was there. Sometimes they were involved in HR-related conversations, sometimes they weren’t. It made for a relatively uncomfortable and uncertain experience, as I mentioned above, in regards to a lack of safe avenues to discuss workplace issues.
