Pros
When the Sandbox acquisition was announced, we were excited. There were a whole bunch of positives just over the horizon: ~ New clients to work on ~ Help with our existing clients ~ Access to tools that would have been otherwise out of reach ~ Access to advancement opportunities that come with greater scale However...
Cons
We pretty quickly realized that most of the promised benefits were simply not there. The idea of Sandbox, in theory, is that all of the offices work together. Everybody brings their experience and skills to the table, and no one office is responsible for any one client or any one task. But instead, we have been left alone, to flounder. Over the last six months since the Sandbox acquisition was finalized, our office has lost 1/3 of its employees to layoffs or resignations. Sandbox corporate refuses to back-fill those positions, and no one from the other offices is integrating into our clients. The result is more work for fewer people, longer hours, more people quitting; it's a vicious cycle. And while we'd love to work on the new clients and opportunities that were promised, how can we, when we barely have enough time to work on the clients we had before the acquisition? I'm not entirely convinced that the company leadership knows what the morale situation is like among the rank and file. The CEO has visited our office to speak with us literally once, when the acquisition was announced. The other company executives seem only to show up to lay people off. Meanwhile, the day-to-day management of our office has been assigned to the four senior-most employees from our old agency that Sandbox hasn't laid off yet--with no representation whatsoever from the company that bought us. In theory, Sandbox has a "Chief Integration Officer" in charge of smoothing out wrinkles like these, but he seems to have already turned his attention to the next acquisition. Where is the team spirit? Where is the collaboration? Sandbox just announced that they had made the "strategic decision" to close an office and lay off the 20ish employees who worked there. I am not one of those employees. I still have my job. But it seems to me like the that office started out very much like us, and it certainly wouldn't surprise me if we eventually suffered a similar fate. To be clear, there are more nit-picky positives and negatives that I haven't listed here. There are free snacks and unlimited PTO. The time-tracking software is garbage. I love a lot of my coworkers, and they often make the long hours worth it. But more important than all that: They will tell you Sandbox is all about collaboration. This is not true. You are on your own.
