Vantaggi
Very well-organized, which makes it easy to onboard/join a project At one point, provided great mentorship/leadership - easy to learn from people with lots of experience. They provided excellent training and mentorship, and it was always encouraged to ask for assistance and learn from others. At one point, many employees available to help one another out, making deadlines smooth/easy to divide up work At some points, decent work/life balance. Flexible and accommodating during COVID to WFH, and allowed people to choose what works best for them, but not sure how it is now. Fun and friendly coworkers who enjoy spending time with one another. Since there's lots of people, you're bound to find people with similar interests. Lots of social events create a welcoming environment to meet everyone. Pretty good pay and benefits compared to other firms in the area.
Svantaggi
Business is valued over design in all aspects of firm culture/design process. There's a lot of corporate jargon thrown around on the daily. A cringe "compliment" they like to use at Norris Design (ND) for the company-man type, is that they are "drinking the ND Kool-Aid" Efficiency is valued above all else when it comes to projects, not enough time is invested into the design process. Its a common consensus that employees eventually lose their passion for design after working here for a while. With the burgeoning environmental crisis, it should be every firms responsibility to push for sustainable design practices. Most of their efforts to make changes has been performative. Good design takes time and care. The main reasons people had to work a bunch of overtime, was because they kept saying yes to every project/they stopped being selective. None of us had been busier than ever before, yet they said they were saying yes to every project, without knowing if they even had the staff to run the project. Norris is saturated at the top, and quick to give promotions (without substantial monetary compensation), leaving little to no project team members in the production sector anymore, which leaves some people to get dumped with all the grunt work, with no help from higher management. The different positions within the company are all arbitrarily defined, there's not a lot of clear responsibilities outlined between the different titles. Higher-ups value meeting unrealistic deadlines over valuing project staff's realistic suggestions, making for poor work/life balance and rushed work. They only started listening to some feedback and attempting to dial back peoples' hours when a bunch of valuable middle-management left the company in a short time-frame. Reviews are based on arbitrary opinions, and don't provide actual metrics/benchmarks for how to grow in the company.