Instrument reviews

Instrument claims they're "different then other agencies" but it's not true. They're only focused on monetary growth without creating any infrastructure, training process or agency wide practices for their employees. As a producer, I found it impossible to understand how to succeed. The executive directors are technically in charge of managing the production discipline on top of finding all the new business and managing all of the other leads on their team which basically made it very difficult for them to provide support. I was told that I would be given training in my first month but I was thrown into the fire, left alone to guess what to do and then later completely torn apart for my mistakes in an "informal review" which was degrading and not constructive. Overall the management team at Instrument is just the leadership teams friends and folks who have worked there the longest but they're completely unqualified to manage people. The way employees are thrown around to different teams without their own opinion taken into consideration and against their own will makes for a completely disparate experience. It's a sink or swim environment and it matters if you're popular and who you know.

1. Executive leadership is all talk and no action. Example: they constantly told people to ask for whatever time off they needed, but HR pushed back hard on managers who tried to support their people this way. 2. People often work nights or weekends to push through and get projects done, in part because resourcing is so chaotic and poorly planned. 3. They recently fired two of the strongest advocates for DEI within the company, one of who was a 10-year employee in non-executive leadership. 4. Execs constantly center their feelings when talking about their commitments to DEI and anti-racism, and make excuses about not wanting to give into urgency when they miss their own deadlines. Too many examples to list, including an exec who talked about their “BIPOC friends” to show how great they were doing at anti-racism work. 5. There’s no real way to talk with execs except through a form where you can submit questions, and those often get a response along the lines of “per our last email” with no actual info. 6. The company is more concerned with external image than how people internally are actually feeling and whether they’re supported. Example: they originally took down their Black Lives Matter splash page 3 days after putting it up, but some employees saw and objected to how shallow and self-serving that timing felt, so it went back up. 7. Many people, especially in the dev discipline, took pay cuts to work here because salaries are lower than industry standard. Are there cool projects? Yes. Are there truly great people to collaborate with? Yes. (Are we in a pandemic and a job here is better than no job? Yes.) That might be enough for you if you can keep your head down and ignore how executive leadership fails to follow through on any real change, and if you can be super strict about work/life balance even when you see your teammates working extra hours - otherwise, this place isn’t worth it.