1. Below-market pay for above-market workload. Traffic/production goals are huge and always getting huger. Consistently exceeding goals is no guarantee of a raise or better title. R29 hires "name" employees and more management.....yet won't spare a small cost of living increase for employyees with a track record of performance.
2. Working nights, weekends and holidays is not the exception -- its regularly expected of every non-Senior employee. Award show, breaking news, celeb death on Sunday night? You'll be up til 2 a.m. putting together a 30-page slideshow, then dragging yourself into work bright and early Monday. Ive worked other places where managers insist on comp time in these situations. Here, no one advocates for you. Ask for comp time and you hear crickets.
3. Your vacation and sick days are meaningless. Yes, you technically have PTO. But your still expected to produce the same # of stories whether you're in-office or not. So you work from your hotel on vacation while your friends are at the beach. You work when you're sick. Your told to work while spending Christmas with your family because "you'll have wifi, right?" Sometimes, you're just told you "can't" take time off. It's treated like no big deal, like of course you owe the company all your time. the stress takes its toll. Morale is lower here than anywhere else Ive ever worked.
4. Management does shady things: people are promised raises that arent delivered. Or you're promised an internal promotion, then they hire from outside. Other top-level employees are just plain toxic. I've heard coworkers have their diet, posture, clothes or the way they walk criticized to their face. Or you're lavished with praise for your work yet called "entitled" when you ask for a raise. Or you're given the silent treatment for accepting a better job offer. There's an instability here that's really nervewracking to be around. The reviewer who describer it as "like working in Mommie Dearest" nailed it.
5. Cynical company culture. Meetings are filled with pep talks about how R29 employees are what make it great. But R29 makes no effort to solve the overwork--burnout issues mentioned in almost every review here. Instead, incredibly enthusiastic 4/5-star reviews start popping up. The fact that r29 would rather whitewash its rep than change its exploitative culture is more than disappointing, it actually hurts, because most of us used to really believe in this brand. Its hurtful to be taken advantage of by something you used to love.
Bottom line: R29 prioritizes traffic over employees sanity. Young employees don't realize how exploitative it is. Older more experienced ones get out as soon as they can (one said it was "like a government experiment"). R29's methods for producing traffic is not sustainable, and brain drain will continue unless they invest honestly in their people.
