Outsourcing and abandoning the talent that made them - Video Editor Storm Ideas Employee Review

My manager, HR partner, and co-workers at Storm Ideas have all been absolutely lovely to work with. Everyone has been incredibly supportive and engaged and I feel empowered to do my best work every day.

As a fully remote team member in a very different time zone, it takes some extra thought to plan communication.

I made great friends at Storm. My line-management was excellent, but largely powerless. I felt supported and understood but not protected but this was the fault upper-management keeping their hands tied. Excellent colleagues & the remote work was useful and made life easy. When I started, Storm was a respectable place to work and I was proud to say I worked there, but this is no longer the case.

Upper management are nepotistic and short sighted. They have (or should I say had, as people are leaving by the day) an excellent pool of employees, who despite being drastically underpaid are all too willing to lend their skills and talents wherever and whenever they might be required. Upper management do not take advantage of this. Instead, they are desperate to replace these individuals with technology they barely understand. Storm’s comprehension of AI and its applications is laughable. Its AI team is a joke - composed mostly of people who seem to know very little about how it works. Storm is still a marketing company - not yet a tech company, and it has forgotten this somehow in its race to feel relevant. It had the opportunity to do something really interesting and unique in the wake of AI becoming more popular - it could have placed faith and money into its employees, and chosen to apply AI in a way that was genuinely helpful day-to-day, enhanced performance and perhaps hired employees who actually understand how it works and how expensive it is - the way codex is used and the things it is used for are genuinely wasteful. I appreciate the argument that it’s essentially impossible to avoid a degree or AI in digital marketing - but the saddest part of all of this is that Storm is replacing its skilled workers with such an embarrassing display of AI workmanship. On top of that, they put a large portion of the company through an unnecessarily painful redundancy process, in which we were left in limbo with no clarity for almost an entire month. They underpay their workers and deny them bonuses whilst openly and blatantly spending on new tech, AI useage and their so-called TeamAI, and hire from countries where they can pay what feels like criminally low wages. When I left I was completely disillusioned, and had zero feelings of loyalty or admiration for the way in which it was being run. I felt very sad for the colleagues I left behind, whose backs are breaking under the weight of their daily tasks. The way things are going - I don’t expect they’ll be around for much longer.