Shiny on the outside. Rotten inside - Recensione dipendente - Senior Compositing Artist presso Rodeo FX

- Worst communication I have ever encountered. They don't communicate and when they do, it's always last minute and always with the wrong or incomplete information. People have always different and opposite answers to the same question and you have to figure it out by yourself which one is most likely the right one, The departments do not communicate with each other on anything, artists are left in the dark all the time expecting to just be able to read minds. Don't ask for anything that might help you better understand the big picture and context of your work or you'll be asked several times why you want to know. - Shots assignment is a constant game of musical chairs, More often than not, you end up with someone else's shot, just for it to be shipped to someone else again 2 weeks later without your knowledge so you can, in turn, pick up another shot from different someone else. Zero feeling of achievement whatsoever. - Planning is a mess, Seniors are put on shows that are late and in delivery hoping they will fix all the problems by doing some magic and untangle months of bad practice and bad work ethics. They often get TechChecks from badly comped shots thrown at them and of course get blamed for not meeting the insanely unreasonable targets. - Speaking of targets, clearly bids are badly done. Either that or the ones doing them do not know what they are talking about, which is concerning. Every target seems off, either too short or too long. There is no long term vision of anything so it's always the "do it wrong but do it fast" that trumps over "take some time but do it right". - Some sups and lead will give you some verbal notes and when the VFX sup will say the opposite, your sup will just throw you under the bus instead of owning his/her own mistake. Overall, leadership is bad, egos are all over the place. - Every show is always in a rush, I have never seen this getting as bad as it was at Rodeo. Every sups and prod do what they want on their own show and they never share the good or the bad to anyone to avoid doing the same mistake on the next show or to implement the tools that could help and save a tremendous amount of time. There is some falsely placed pride game in which a sup will stick to a decision even if he/she knows it's a bad one, just out of pride. I haven't really seen anything else than chaos on all the shows I've been with and heard some horror stories from other people on other shows. - The ShotGrid workflow they opted to use is 100% production oriented. You have zero flexibility to make it fit your artist needs. It is so painful to use and cumbersome, especially since you are expected to use it heavily to fill your time/estimate etc... You can't even change the email notification settings to pick which ones are relevant for you to receive, which is annoying like hell, ending up getting spammed with hundreds of notifications about unrelated shows/tasks/department to the point where email-filtering could become a full-time job. Ironically, you never get the ones (notifications) you would REALLY need. - Workflow decisions are usually taken last minute and most of the time they do not make any sense. Any attempt to suggest a faster and more efficient way to do the same thing will be swept with the back of the hand and often held against you as being reluctant to follow instructions. - The pipeline is so obsolete (to be polite). It is at least 5 to 10 years late compared to most other VFX Companies. Any attempt to suggest a new tool idea or improvement will be met with a 'no' or simply no answer at all. - The ticket system and its teams are abysmal, don't expect an answer - let alone a solution - to your urgent issues (like no working computer) before at least 3 days, and even up to 3 months for a medium priority issue, unless they just decide to close your ticket without doing anything. - There are a lot of people at key positions who don't seem entirely secure and constantly question your professional judgment, it's exhausting in addition to being insulting. As a result, it creates a very toxic work environment where you often encounter situations with sup/prod/management that tend to make you lose confidence in your abilities and make you feel like an incompetent 4 years old. I've often seen leads/sup blaming fault on the artists just to be able to shine to their own boss, it's despicable. - Politics and nepotism have taken a huge place in the past few years. The work environment was better before it shifted to the "quantity over quality" sort of mindset. - There are two kinds of crowd : 1. People who've been working here for a long time, who make the core of the company, always stay together on projects, get to pick with whom they work and on what. 2. People who've been joining recently and/or after the company has grown, who can never access the good show/shots, the good team/sups, they constantly end up getting bounced from project to project on the worst time ever with no warning. A worrying amount of sups don't even know how the tools and/or pipeline work. Instead of being honest about it and saying they don't have the answer, they gaslight artists for even asking the question. - Huge lack of updated information and training, the onboarding process seems good until you realize you've been given obsolete information to read/learn from just because nothing gets shared anymore. - Most of the time, when in meeting, French people will speak French to answer each other's questions instead of English to let everyone understand just in case it might be of interest to someone else not understanding/speaking French. Not everyone does it though but I've seen it too often. I'm not saying French should not be spoken, I just think it'd be nice to also have the information in English or to speak a common language during meetings. - If you're a junior, forget about training whatsoever, you are expected to figure it out on your own on how to learn new things and be up to date. Good luck. - Make sure to have everything you all agreed on in writing as they say a LOT of stuff they really don't intend to actually do. They lie and promise you whatever but never give the info to the right person or right communication channel so nothing ends up getting done. I thought it was unintentional at first but after some time it seemed like more and more malicious practice. I have never encountered such poor work ethics and I work in VFX for a living. - Another reason to get everything in writing is that some people over there will not hesitate to make wrongful accusations about someone's work simply to either get away with a mistake or get what they want. This is the only place I worked at where I have seen something like this. - There is so much gossip behind people's backs sometimes it feels like high school. - One of the things I've heard the most was something along the lines of "We've always been doing it this way so no need to change." which is usually a red flag. - I am a little disappointed about their claim on diversity. They say it's part of the core of their identity but I have some doubts. Sure it is great to work with people coming from different countries, but the diversity seems to stop there. - Also note that if you were participating in the program in which the company invests in your retirement plan, know that if you leave the company - willingly or unwillingly - before a certain amount of time (I think 2.5 years at least), you'll lose every $ the company invested since you started. I get that it's an employee retention strategy and I can understand it from their business point of view but it's also a bit shady to mess with people's retirement plans.