Pros
• I was able to use my musical knowledge every day while working in this position. In fact, it would be incredibly difficult to work here without an intermediate understanding of music. It felt very gratifying that my college degree in music was actually an asset and not just a piece of paper with the reflection of a youthful dream. • The flexibility of work/life balance was incredible. In a salaried position, one has immense flexibility in their day to day work schedule. If you needed to run an errand, no problem. If you had a last minute schedule change and needed to take off early, you could do it and not be scrutinized. So long as you got your work done, that's all that really mattered. How and when were up to you. If you needed to take a day off, it was preferred to give at least a 24 hour notice about it, but they understand that we are all humans doing our best to navigate life and respected that. • The people at middle management and below will actually become your friends. Not in some silly team building way, but because they are all musicians too and have similar interests. So many people there are in local ensembles, in bands together, or just hang out for fun because they enjoy the same kind of beer. It really is a great place to meet people in the music/tech/outdoor scene and I was grateful for everyone I directly worked with. • The autonomy, mentioned a little bit before, is great for someone like me. I was able to find ways to build content that worked for me and didn't have to stick to some strict way of doing something just because my manager said so. Once you're able to get a handle on the workflows, as long as you can create good content, you can create it however you like and that's something I did value about my position. All in all, if you're a musician in Colorado, I would still recommend this position.
Cons
• The current remote work policy is incredibly outdated. The parent company (Peaksware) had everyone working from home since March of 2020. Then around May of 2020 they shut down one building in California and made the employees who were out there move to Colorado to continue to work from home (???) instead of just working from home where they already lived. During this time, construction was being done for a new building for the company with a 2021 end date. I understand that they wanted folks to work in the new building, but to make people move across the country during the earlier stages of the pandemic, pre-vaccine era mind you, felt incredibly irresponsible. Though I was grateful to still have a job and work from home instead of being told I need to go into the office, I don't think it was necessary for them to have people move to Colorado just to work from home. • Continuing on the remote work policy, the only reason I am no longer at the company is because my wife's job had us relocate to another state and my remote work request was denied. I had been working at the company full time since 2015, and we moved in June of 2021, having worked at home since March of 2020, it simply was a decision that still doesn't make sense to me. I really thought that by contributing as much as I did to the company and outside of the company for the time that I did, as well as giving them ~2 years of a heads up that we might have to move out of state, it was disheartening to hear that it wasn't enough to keep me on in a remote position. • Now that Colorado has the pay ranges listed on job postings, it's gotten a little better, but the transparency in salaries/raises was nonexistent for a while. In fact, after they had to start positing the salaries, some of us saw significant raises so that they were paying the current position the current salary. So it's something I see getting better, but it wasn't for a long time and was definitely one of the reasons the company saw a mass exodus of employees over the past year. Yes, things are changing and I'm sure they are going to be for the better, but the pace was a little to slow to keep a lot of good talent around. • This specific job is so niche. I loved doing it and loved training others how to do it, but because it's so unique, it becomes difficult for others outside of the department to understand the value of our work. Heck, Glassdoor even says "This job title isn't in our system. Did you enter it correctly?" and even Music Production Engineer isn't the best descriptor of what we do on a day to day basis. So when our value isn't understood, our pay isn't equal to our work, and people leave. I was willing to grin and bear it for the hopes of working remotely, but even that didn't pan out. So again, I loved this job and this position, but unless you came from the department, if felt as if few people really understood our value. • Because the department is so niche, there is also no upward movement. You can go from MPE to Manager, but as of now, there's only one manager, so until they decide to move on or do something else, there's nowhere to go except for a different department. So if you're happy to just keep on keeping on, then this is great, but it becomes difficult to justify a raise or want when there's nothing to move up towards. There's no "Lead MPE" or "Entry Level MPE" so after a few years, you start asking yourself "what's the next step?" and every answer is "not in this department" which is terrible, especially when you like the work.
