Pros
There are many things about working at 99 that are great. Full time employees get good benefits like health insurance, gym, commute assist etc.. They also have a nice kitchen stocked up. And generally the people who work there are pretty good.
Cons
But working for 99designs marketing team is extremely challenging. There's a lot of politics that don't help the company move forward. There's a level of nepotism that gets in the way of good work. The Upper upper management clearly have their favorite people who end up having the power to make decisions they are ill equipped to make. Mostly they favor their Australian male mattes. Doesn't matter if you have ten years more experience. If you are american and a woman you will not be heard. The Marketing department doesn't really act like a Marketing department. All they do is data Analysis. The upper management is very hands off and doesn't really care about the team. During my employment there i never exchanged a word with them. There's no vision from the upper management about what the company's brand should look like. And it's very surprising that a company who claims to help business build their brand has very little of their own. The marketing team is reactionary. They function basically on meeting quotas and have no marketing plan beyond a month in advance. Which is bad business if you're in marketing. A few weeks before I left we all got a message from the upper management asking for employees to give them good reviews on glassdoor, which is extremely unethical in my opinion. Note that most reviews here are from designers who work with 99designs platform. They are not employees of 99designs.
