If This Is Your Only Job Option, I Can't Fault You For Taking It - Production Mustache Employee Review

HR is friendly but incompetent. Higher ups ask for diverse freelancer recommendations but rarely hire them (and when they hire it usually takes a PUSH from the rest of the team to do so). PAs are still paid $210 on shoots but if the team nags higher ups they can sometimes get the rate to $225. This is a commercial company that should be paying PAs at least $250. On this note, all freelancers (and also plenty of full-time employees) are underpaid. Crew is almost always understaffed - it doesn't matter if you ask for just one more person, you won't get it. You're told there is room for advancement but there isn't (unless you started when Mustache was young).IF you started when Mustache was young you'll have been promoted to higher positions you don't have the experience for. Many of the producers are friendly but they're not strong in their role. This makes them frantic, they micromanage, and they expect you to stay late hours because they can't delegate what they need from the team until 5 or 6pm. General atmosphere is a boys' club - women's ideas are dumb (even to other women) unless you say it was a man's idea. You HAVE to attend their social events. If you have no interest in socializing at a mansion with all your colleagues you will be guilted into attending regardless. They're always looking to point a finger. If you've made a mistake and own it they have no idea what to do. But if you see someone else has made a mistake and no one owns up too it they will point the finger at anyone and everyone. Cognizant purchased them in 2019 and in early 2020 new rules were being implemented which delayed production's calendars. Needing all crew to submit a background check within a few days of a shoot is not feasible. Constantly asking accounting to approve higher purchases so production cards are not declined (flights, hotels, rental cars, doesn't matter) is not efficient. Created content isn't the highest quality - definitely lower than what one would expect for a creative agency. Pretty much anything you can expect to go wrong, will, because leadership cares about the bottom line. They don't use logic or reasoning to make decisions. Just greed. They tend to hire/promote based on how much they like you rather than skills or experience. I don't know if anyone reading this can tell but working at Mustache was not a good time and the only reason I stayed nearly a year was the promise of upward mobility.