Pros
The office is hip and located in a nice area of Louisville. Pay is competitive and the benefits are better than average, including paid healthcare. Also, they provide snacks and, on occasion, lunch. The client roster consists mostly of the Silicon Valley “elite” who appreciate that KBD provides inexpensive designs quickly with only minimal fees for multiple rounds of revision and allows clients to art direct projects themselves.
Cons
I have never encountered a workplace culture as toxic and unorganized as the one that exists presently at KBD. There is a lot wrong with this place—a complete lack of project management, poor leadership, and a caustic culture where employees gaslight, gossip about, and undermine each other with passive aggression and not-so-subtle popularity contests—which is sad, because from the outside looking in it should be a cool place to work. Bless their hearts, that isn't even the worst of it. Managers will say they are working on a project, only for it to languish for months before being dropped, half-baked, onto a designer's lap days or hours before the deadline. Then, when deadlines are missed, the production staff gets blamed. Projects started by management are often created in incorrect or outdated programs (large websites designed in Photoshop or print documents in Illustrator), with structures so unorganized and broken that production staff must spend hours redoing work before beginning the endless rounds of pixel-pushing edits that every project goes through. Edits work similarly; they will often sit in a manager’s queue for days waiting on feedback, before being returned with a dozen changes (major, minor, and sometimes contradictory) either right before a meeting or just as the designer heads home for the day. Furthermore, micro-management is ingrained in the DNA of KBD. Once I had to work in front of my manager’s desk making minor revisions to a dozen web layouts while the minutes until the client presentation meeting were literally counted down out loud. Every few minutes my manager would offer art direction such as, “move this down 10 pixels,” or “make that color 15% lighter”. Later, to add insult to injury, when I was in trouble—as employees arbitrarily are for extended periods of time—this literal micro-management was brought up as an example of “collaboration”. In this same conversation, I was told that 2019 would be the year when “everyone would be super excited to work late every night,” which perfectly illustrates the absurd level of cognitive disconnect between leadership and employees. The rest of the leadership team is no better. Heads of departments dislike and work to undermine each other daily. Gossip, tribalism, hypocrisy, and passive aggression are rampant, while favoritism ensures that some employees will constantly feel embattled, with a target placed on them as they work late to meet ridiculous deadlines, as others play Tetris and shop online for hours, then leave early. Favored employees are allowed extended leaves of absence during busy parts of the year with no compensation to the remaining, over-worked employees for their increased workload. Certain managers will schedule pointless one-on-one gossip meetings or attend client meetings where they have no business to discuss as a way of filling their timesheets and thus avoid doing work, while other managers refuse to work with certain employees and ignore processes put in place to try and make things run more effectively. Employees and managers who do speak up are often punished by being demoted, being isolated and removed from projects or teams, being given unfulfilling and menial work to do, and being placed under a microscope where minor mistakes are blown out of proportion. There are other issues that become unbearable over time as well, including leadership's irksome habit of referring to employees as “children”, a certain spouse distracting or pontificating at employees during work hours or at office functions, upper-management’s chronic tardiness and absenteeism, and constantly being told that the high-school intern is a better designer than you are. All of this sits atop a bedrock of distrust and disrespect. HR has been known to read the personal chat logs of employees and gossip about the contents with managers, partners and spouses are contacted when employees fail to check in during PTO, and things said in confidence to one manager will later be thrown back in your face by another. Overall, all of this makes for a highly stressful and noxious work environment in which your happiest day will also be your last.