Pros
Working at Tandem will hopefully be an experience that you can view (down the road) in a less negative light and more as a learning experience. You will witness how with the right connections/clients, and good search engine optimization, you can form your own successful design studio! Bluntly put, if this guy can do it, so can you. Working at Tandem right out of school keeps you sketching daily, continuing to use 3D modeling software, and hopefully pads the portfolio with Keyshot renderings that the owner may feature on the website. The rapid pace of this job helped me to learn how to quickly take designs from a quick thumbnail sketch into 3D CAD, and the work I did here is still work I'm proud of years later. As consultancies go, there was great work life balance, and I rarely recall weeks I needed to work over 40 hours, and definitely never over a weekend. You work on a lot of projects in a short amount of time if business is good, and a lot of the times it's just front end design ideation, so it's nice to not have to worry about all the nitty gritty engineering.
Cons
The other reviews on here aren't wrong...the owner has a short fuse temper, but this taught me to be a better communicator. I learned to over-communicate before executing on a design and it tended to work out in my favor. I witnessed his yelling at other employees, people on the phone, or even furniture delivery people. If you can't handle being micromanaged, this might not work out. If you don't have thick skin, this might not work out. I know what some of the "secretive" comments are about, and I know most of it is rooted in the owner trying to conceal the financials, because let's face it, if you the designer do ALL
the work for a deliverable that takes 3 weeks, and that deliverable is valued at your salary, you start to feel a little cheated when it comes to salary.