Pros
-The sense of responsibility and ownership can be rewarding, even for younger staff. There's a lot of freedom to propose new initiatives and step up for new opportunities if it's something you're passionate about. Once I became an associate, I was able to take on even greater levels of responsibility and participation within the firm's culture itself, which was often gratifying. -I appreciated the research- and evidence-based design focus. It's something that many firms claim, but DLR actually followed through on this quite effectively. -It can be exciting and rewarding to be surrounded by such passionate people with big ideas. As someone with many interests, I was able to learn about a wide variety of topics from the experts I was connected to. -My team was a wonderful group of people, almost all of whom are incredibly talented and passionate. -Benefits and pay were standard for experience level.
Cons
-I was laid off as part of the COVID slowdown. I understand that these things happen and I'm sure that the firm leadership looked at every other option first. My issue is with how it was handled. I was an associate who'd been there for multiple years, and rather than my own manager having the courage and decency to let me go themselves, I was laid off in a 15min Zoom call with over a dozen others. Since then, many of my former team members have been incredibly kind and compassionate, yet my own manager has never reached out or acknowledged the situation. I've had to reach out multiple times to different depts to find out about severance and other necessary info, rather than it being provided as it should. It all leaves a very bad taste for a firm I was proud to work for. -The firm talks a big game and has ambitious ideas, but the reality of the projects never come close to matching those ideals. The firm's messaging promotes sustainability as a key tenant of our work, yet only a small percentage of the projects even bother with basic sustainable design. Design quality is supposed to be our focus, yet the reality of projects and a profit-focused leadership strategy oppose that ideal - project schedules, budgets, and teams often don't provide the necessary time to explore quality design strategies effectively, design staff are typically stretched far too thin, and many of our clients don't match our stated ideals. It leads to a point where new goals and initiatives are announced from on high (more focus on pathways to net zero design! design quality is crucial!), but you eventually become cynical and just shrug it off as a fantasy because they never make the changes necessary to day-to-day project workflow to even begin to support such ambitious initiatives. As someone who cared deeply about many of those initiatives, it's incredibly frustrating to watch. -Even though you have a lot of freedom to focus on exciting initiatives outside of projects, it will be left up to you to make time for those outside of your already full project schedule. -Their mentorship program seems to lack the necessary weight. It works well enough if your goals are straightforward and align to typical career paths, but I found that trying to become more unconventionally specialized in areas I was passionate about was much more difficult and lacked the same support and momentum unless I put in my own time and effort outside of work to learn these new skills. -While many of the firm's offices I visited had great and vibrant office cultures, the Minneapolis office feels stale and dated by comparison. There are major physical and social separations between groups, so between that and the actual design of the office, design collaboration (a skill we vocally pride ourselves on) is incredibly challenging within the office. -Work/life balance could be challenging, which is to be somewhat expected in this field, but was greatly exacerbated by the absolutely abysmal balance and lack of boundaries from some of the PMs / managers. I've worked at firms before that expect 60+ hours per week, so I used the lessons I learned then to do my best to maintain healthy boundaries and schedules here. But when your managers regularly send emails after 10pm, midnight, 2am, etc, and send you urgent new deadlines based on those kinds of schedules, it becomes really difficult to maintain those healthy boundaries. This creates a lot of stress, pressure, and anxiety even on otherwise standard project tasks, all of which feels completely unnecessary and frustratingly unprofessional.