Only just O.K. - Recensione dipendente - Designer presso Lightmaker

The processes at Lightmaker could really use help. The project managers constantly fight for resources (ie. designers and developers), which creates fragmentation between the teams, the vision of the project, the scope of the work and quality of deliverables. Often the people who get assigned to these projects are not the ones who scoped the work, which results in lots of friction between sales and people who have to work on them. In an effort to keep these projects on budget, this deficit in time and scope is often absorbed by employees and paid back with free beer and takeout. While Lightmaker strives to be as efficient with it's resources as possible, they do a really poor job of managing studio time. Mornings often start with a SCRUM, but it's pretty pointless as all 20 or so employees are all on different projects, so good luck actually catching up with anyone if you are on a project with them and getting on with your work. Lightmaker is also really bad about overbooking resources too. They will often put an entire 8 billable hours of one project or task on a person, but not account for meetings or reviews that may take place, and then structure billable milestones around those schedules. This recipe almost always ends up in frustrated clients, frazzled PM's and overworked employees. When it comes to client pushback, LM is really great about giving them a solid product, but only at first. Once strategy and design are done, and a project moves into development. the managers at LM have no problem adding and removing features and changing the project based on client feedback. Management at Lightmaker is also not very nice either. There were often times my creative director would talk down to me, even calling me names. And not just me, but other employees too, making it difficult to work. Often times the creative director will hand over projects without fully explaining them, with only partially done creative or wireframes, and can be incredibly reluctant if not combative to offer any additional information outside of the initial brief. He also has very little to do with projects once they get going; much of the success of projects depends on the designers to manage their own resources, while he every once in a while looks over them and goes 'Yeah, looks good.' I get it, there are people with strong personalities, but Lightmaker's creative director acts entitled and above the work that his department puts out...and that is very distressing. Lightmaker doesn't really take care of it's employees very well. Unless you're a director or one of the people that's been there for over 5 years, good luck going to any conferences or getting a chance to meet a client in person. At the end of the year, they give out awards to recognize people; some of these awards include: hardest worker, best intern, most FRAPED (that's Facebook Raped, and no I didn't make that up), etc. They also give out awards for best development team and things like that, but it must really feel awful to win an award for being Facebook-Raped and not for any of the awesome work you've put out or projects you've contributed to. The environment at Lightmaker is also pretty dismal. It's a big, dark, grey and black office with no viewable windows. There were tinted windows way up front that everyone could look through at first, but then they put up a nice grey wall to block it. There's no hot water, no dishwasher, and no silverware. The sink is constantly filled with dishes and the fridge is cleaned out maybe once every 3 months. Oh, and the PM's blast loud house music constantly, and it drives everyone crazy. Buy headphones, they crank it louder--turn it off, and it comes right back on. The drive is also pretty awful too. Their office is across the street from a sewage treatment plant, and it's all the way out on Sand Lake Road, which means that you'll always spend at least 40-60 mins. commuting no matter what. For the amount of management, level of quality expected and overtime that end up being put into projects, the bonuses aren't very impressive, and the pay is only good for so long. If you want a raise, you'll only ever get one if you threaten to quit or work someplace else. If you present how much work you've done, or what you've improved you'll get haggled on whatever amount you want a raise for. All of this makes Lightmaker sound like the worst place to work. It's not. There are some good things, but they are few and far between. All in all though, there are way better places in Orlando to work than Lightmaker.