Pros
-Nice looking, sunny studio -Free snacks and Beverages -All DLR Group staff--external to DC office--seems nice and friendly and genuinely cares about their company and their people
Cons
-DLR Group acquired Sorg Architects recently to establish an East Coast presence. I would strongly caution anyone interested in working at the DC office to go read the Glassdoor reviews for Sorg Architects. They have a notoriously poor reputation within the DC area regarding their employees. -As part of the acquisition DLR Group kept all the bad actors in place that make this a horrible place to work to begin with, citing "office culture". All the management in the DC office are the same people that ran Sorg Architects. -The DLR Group name is really all smoke and mirrors. I think Sorg is no longer able to attract quality people to this office and win any work. The whole operation feels like a desperate sinking ship. -For the goodt project you see in their DC portfolio these are the exceptions! There are TONS of boring grunt work projects that no one wants to work on to keep the office afloat. Any interesting project will probably involve working with the Princial which is plain painful and dehumanzing! -They are notorious for having an extremely high turnover rate. They seem to staff based on projects hiring and firing at will and frequently. I’ve seen at least 10-14 people go through this tiny office within a year. You'll also inevitably ending up having to clean up other people's messes--without any real idea of what's happening since that person is no longer there. -On the bright side if you can last here more than a year you will build a tremendous network from the amount of people that pass through this firm. -Even clients seem to be not too happy with performance on many different projects. They've been quite a few projects that just stopped based on the direction the project went and a few more lawsuits that are kept really hush hush through the office. I think the majority of this can be attributed to the disfunctional work environment. -There is also a new focus on "Justice Architecture" i.e. Jails out of the East Coast/DC office. See boring grunt work above. - The studio actually does not work very well as an office environment. Too few bathrooms, no private areas to work or make a phone call, no privacy/acoustic separation from co-workers conversations or the principal screaming through the office.
