The overarching and immediately noticeable cons: The Denver office has a slightly trashy, and uncomfortable feel to it. The location on 16th street is a really poor choice. If you commute to work and use the provided spaces in the parking garage across the street, you will have to watch where you step on the way in. Whomever is responsible for the parking garage does a very poor job of keeping the homeless from using it as a toilet bowl and drug den. Consider the stairwell completely off limits. You will inevitably have to tiptoe around the occasional puddle of urine, bowel movement, or discarded needle. The office itself does not have a cleanly feel to it either. There are definitely signs of sick building syndrome. The stale air coming from the vents not only blows dust around, but also has the occasional cigarette smell to it. Since everything in the office is bright white, you can't help but notice how dirty it gets. The inside of the office feels pretty clinical and is a good example of how an open office plan fails. The workstations have minimal dividers so everyone's papers, books, and drawings will slowly encroach into each other's spaces. Sound is also an issue. You can hear every side conversation in the office. If that isn't enough of a distraction, there is also the unfortunate communal sonos speakers located around the office. If you don't bring your own headphones to drown out everything else, you will be subjected to your coworkers awful choice in music. Nothing shatters your concentration like a Miley Cyrus tune. Also, Thursday is “country thursday.” If you are hired on as an hourly employee you have to use the paycom app to clock in and out of work. You also have to clock out for lunch for a minimum of thirty minutes a day or HR will be calling you. It's pretty unfortunate when you work so hard to get Masters degrees and Architecture licenses and then be treated like a factory worker who has to carry their timecard wherever they go.
Now for the major cons and reasons for why the office is especially dysfunctional: It’s segregated into a design team and a production team. The designers spend hundreds of hours playing in sketchup for the first several months of a project. They do an especially poor job of considering how a site plan works and how a building should be oriented on it. Rather than developing a floor plan and designing a facade around it, they just design from the outside in. This causes a bunch of problems when it hits the production side of the office. Lots of time is wasted having discussions about design intent versus common sense: “why is there a 3o7o window in the shower again?” Other major blunders in accessibility and space planning inevitably surface too. Overall, The designs are usually thoughtless pinterest regurgitations adorned with a lousy color scheme. Closer inspection reveals a deep lack of understanding in construction and details.
After design has had their several months of playtime, It's now the job of the production team to put the building into revit. This is especially painful because you have to use one of the most ill conceived Revit templates that's ever been produced. It was clearly designed around someone's total lack of BIM knowledge. This means you will have to resort to low tech, manual data entry for Keynotes, Area plans, and various other schedules. The list of roundabout, redundant means and methods to their work is too lengthy to describe here. I was told in my Interview that the Denver office is the Revit hub of the company. How laughable. The bottom line is that there is no hope for improvement. There is zero interest in changing anything for the better. Deep insecurities prevent them from adopting new ideas and they are very quick to rationalize their dumb workflow by saying “ thats how we’ve always done it.”
Don't think the roll of “job captain” actually means anything other than higher level draftsman. If you are an intelligent, self respecting person, seek out good architects to work for. If you want to take your chances with KTGY, just know that success does not come through good ideas, hard work, or productivity, It comes through flattery and bootlicking.
