Plenty of undercurrents - behind the ‘fun’ culture that the company portrays on its socials, it’s actually incredibly toxic. Out here, it’s really whose protection you have, not how many likes, clicks & shares you get, which leads me to my next few points.
Helpful? I think not. If you’re not one of the in-crowd, don’t expect to receive any help. I once knew someone whose projects were delayed (and consequently took the rep for) cuz everyone played taijiquan / pass the parcel and denied them help, since ‘not my expertise’.
Also seen employees get publicly humiliated for no reason, all under the guise of banter.
Every piece of content goes through multiple rounds of vetting by different people with different expectations, which resultingly slows things down a lot. I’ve known people who’ve had to redo whole pieces of content just cuz someone higher up didn’t like it, and others who had their work secretly redone by someone who didn’t like them. Unsurprisingly, the people whose work got redone got the credit, while the original creators’ KPIs (and morale, for obv reasons) took a hit.
There are people here who bring their baggage to work too, whether it’s losses in their personal life (sex seems to be a fav lunch topic here) or other things. Consequently, incidents like my previous point happen (for unspoken reasons such as grudges among colleagues), resulting in lesser work done, thus affecting KPIs.
Girls may run the world, but interns ‘run’ the company. No, like seriously. Why pay for fulltimers when 3-4 interns will do the job? There’ll always be a steady stream of people wanting to intern here anyway, given the reputation and reach. Consequently, interns aren’t here to learn, the only thing they’ll ‘learn’ is how to churn out content fast, quality (reach-wise) be damned. I’ve also seen fulltimers degrade interns behind their backs, cuz well, poor quality mah (but this kinda thing cannot say out loud).
Miscomm between clients and involved departments, but somehow, it’s the intern’s fault - after multiple rounds of back and forth between client and company, the intern went down to shoot location, only to find that there was no shoot, before promptly getting scolded for wasting time.
CEO has a ego more fragile than glass - someone once asked (during a townhall Q&A session, no less) if there could be more Adobe Creative Suite accounts, since so many departments were constantly fighting over access. But because CEO didn’t expect that qn, from then on, townhalls had no more Q&As.
Once knew of an intern who had to use their AL for a family member’s wake, which speaks volumes about the company.
Knew of an employee put on PIP who was kept 'motivated' by threats - their superiors threatened to smear their name across the industry should their 'poor' performance keep up. Needless to say, the employee left soon after.
To wrap things up, someone here once declared ‘you work for us, not with us’ to a subordinate, before proceeding to gaslight them, which really encapsulates things around here.
