Pros
The Office location is ideal
Cons
It says a lot when you find more relief and peace being unemployed than having to work here. This was a huge step back in my career even for the short time I was there. The cons are innumerable but there are a glaring few. - GROSSLY underpaid. Compensation isn’t competitive at all and like another poster mentioned, they will low ball you with their offer. I was told one Salary range during interviews but when my offer came and I asked for the top of the range, i was told they made a mistake with the range provided. - 12 days PTO. In 2020. That’s it. -No sick days. If you’re sick and can’t work, you have to take PTO. - Benefits are poor. Until the merger with Freeman, you didn’t receive any paid maternity/paternity leave. Nothing. Now you get a whole 2 weeks. Shameful. - Work from home policy is a joke. It takes at least 6 months to ‘earn’ enough hours to work from home for a full day. There are successful, fully remote companies and yet here it’s looked at as a privilege you have to earn. - You have to track everything you do throughout the day via timesheets in 15 minute increments. And they throughly check to see what you’re spending your time on and if you have ‘bandwidth’ to do more mediocre work. -I was out sick and forgot to cancel a 1:1 with a colleague in a different office. I was told it would go into my ‘file.’ Literally a week later, my manager did the same thing and forgot to cancel our 1:1 while out on vacation. Of course when they did it, it wasn’t a big deal. But I certainly pointed it out and my manager just smirked. - Other teams are understaffed yet they won’t hire additional folks to help. Team members were literally drowning. Working late nights. Weekends. With zero reprieve. Management pretends to care and ‘hear you’ yet nothing is ultimately done. - The Chicago office is miserable. - the office is in the corner of a larger organization. There are no windows. And cubicles that are reminiscent of a 90s office. - ‘Upper management’ could care less about your skills and experience. Talking to your manager is akin to speaking to a brick wall. They don’t care what projects you want to work on, what your strengths are, they simply want a workhorse to churn out work just to have it done. - The Chicago office is VERY small and usually empty. Honestly it should be a satellite office but mdg is stuck on control, they have to ‘see’ you in the office despite most meetings being virtual. - The work is very mediocre. I’m sure it’s directly proportional to the salaries they pay as you get what you pay for. It’s like an alternate universe that I’m so thankful to no longer be apart of. - Turnover is high - This place is so cheap yet it’s still a secret on what they are actually spending money on because it’s not salaries, benefits, perks, office space, free food, snacks, ping pong tables..nothing that other companies usually offer to get people ‘excited’ about coming into an office 5x/week. - It takes 3 months before you ‘qualify’ to use the pre transportation option. - They have an insane amount of useless training they swear by. None of it is customized to your experience coming in. So essentially you’re listening to training videos about things you’ve done your whole career but they call it the ‘mdg way.’ It’s a total waste of time. - If you are mid level in your career or above, do not come here. You’ll be underpaid severely and more than likely over worked on projects you have little to no experience doing. You’ll come in as a skilled strategist and end up moonlighting as a copywriter writing project briefs, scripts, email copy despite there being copywriters on staff. - team members mentioned having anxiety whenever walking in for the day. -you have to pretend to be happy here but it’s clear how miserable most are, at least in the Chicago office. -I absolutely hated working here. Advice to management Policies have their place (thinking legal requirements/compliance) and guidelines provide the framework for fairness and aligning expectations but common sense, conversation and STRONG leadership go a LONG way! We're on the dawn of a new industrial revolution - Industry 4.0 - and this stuff matters more now than ever...mdg is well behind.
