Typical agency; high stress, high turn over, lots of perks - Anonymous employee Verndale Employee Review

-Difficult to focus due to the open floor plan and other people's conversations, phone calls, ad hoc meetings, bantering, dogs, people playing with or yelling at dogs and people with loud headphones. -Some good ideas from the executives but poor application and they ultimately get abandoned or changed in a couple months. The mentality is that the next tool or software will fix all the problems at the company and while implementing and defining the process new issues are found. -The common areas in the Boston office are filthy, people don't clean up after themselves. Lots of stains in the rugs from dog urine or people just not cleaning their spills. Fruit flies and ants get to be a problem when people store food at their desks. The refrigerator is often full of molding food because people don't throw out their leftovers/old lunches. Water, coffee, popcorn and other food dispensers are rarely cleaned so there's usually a film on these but they remain in use. -The office is dated but has some updated/modern areas. Dogs and people will walk by and the floor/monitors will shake. The fire alarm has been known to go off for no reason. The building is in an area with garbage all over the streets. The area is supposedly "up and coming" so there's a fair amount of construction taking place in the neighborhood but ultimately it's a dated and dirty building that isn't maintained. -Unless you're a department manager employees need to find on-street parking. Cars left overnight are frequently broken into. The streets around the building are always covered with broken glass from car windows. Employee cars are often towed due to street cleaning. Parking in the winter is extremely difficult as the sidewalks and roads are covered in snow. Sidewalks in the area are usually not shoveled meaning people are forced to walk in the road. -A good allegory for the company is that there are 4 "employee parking" spots in the lot and the partners (who own the building/lot) take up 2 of them every day. There's an illusion of incentive and reward but ultimately the comfort/development of the employee is not a priority. That being said there is an official incentive program that rewards working late/extra billable work, basically if you work an additional 20 billable hours you get a $100 gift card. -There is a volunteer initiative where people can give back to the community. Sounds great except people are required to make up the volunteer hours to hit their billable target for the week. -The sales process is "just to get to the table" so estimates are too low given the company's overhead and process. Projects are usually undersold to end up impacting timeline and scope down the road. -For a company that usually has 3+ dogs in the office every day there is a lot of food lying around. One dog was hospitalized due to eating things off the floor. Larger dogs can eat out of the smaller trash cans that are on the floor. -Project managers are expected to work 50+ hours and weekends. Working on weekends is the primary way of getting recognition for anyone. People usually have to work extra hours because the projects are poorly defined or undersold and cannot be fixed/billed on normal time. -Processes change too frequently to accurately define what/who is needed for a project and how it will progress. Each department has their own way of doing things and will break from any semblance of a standardized process. -People aren't usually treated as individuals but rather as replaceable resources. These resources are swapped on projects as needed resulting in momentum and knowledge loss. Outside of the technology departments there is little concern about people's personal development and training is minimal; it's basically sink or swim. -All that being said if you do work the 50+ hours a week and get along with management employees can be promoted extremely quickly.