Good Experience, But I *Get* the Bad Experiences - Still, Don't Be Scared Off So Easily
Pros
Really good PTO with 5 summer days and closure btwn Xmas and New Year's in addition to your normal PTO. I was spoiled forever. For me, work/life balance was good. I do want to say, if you are considering FINN, and then gut-checking it on Glassdoor, the experience is completely dependent on your business unit. I elaborate more in the Cons - but I had a good experience, one I valued and was a net positive for 8 years. I don't want people scared off when that may not be everyone's experience - especially if a candidate really likes the people they are interviewing with and sees the career move as pretty smart otherwise. Some departments are lovely - use your intuition on whether your manager is going to back you, or punish you, in times of stress. I've founded plenty of people for which the former is true - I think that outnumbers the latter. Do you feel lucky? I like Peter Finn, who is soft-spoken and I believe has a good heart. He handled COVID well. And I do think, despite the critiques of management elsewhere, they are mostly good people.
Cons
Salary seems under market, so you have a lot of middle to upper middle mgmt leaving for agencies that pay more. A review further down is headlined: "Some business units may be ok, but mine wasn't." I agree (except I was one of the lucky ones in a "good" business unit). FINN is like a collection of 70 loosely associated fiefdoms which play by their own rules. I enjoyed the people I worked with, and the senior management within my unit were decent, smart, nice people; they weren't perfect, but there wasn't the toxicity I see described elsewhere. (You hear the worst things from the teams in Chicago and San Francisco, which seem to be run by, and I can only find one way to say this, mean dummies. (I also don't want to slander anyone individually by name, but anyone reading this will know who I'm talking about, which is the loudest, most public, most show-y person at FINN, who really talks a big game about higher level values and loft principles, is an exhausting narcissist and total phony. Prove me wrong!) Management, in my experience, is unimpressive but harmless; it's a lot of people giving each other high fives all day long. They're a pretty self-absorbed group, but I don't find them to be cutthroat or abusive the way you might famously find at other agencies. That never bothered me until it was time for someone to back me up; I do think to thrive at the highest level you kind of have to be a relentless self-promoter.
