The most exploitative studio I've seen. Floundering amidst horrible financial decisions.
Pros
The day to day people are great, its very easy to fine friends and bottom-mid level people genuinely enjoy what they do an are passionate about it. I have friendships and connections I will maintain outside of Deluxe for years to come. There are moments where you will get to work on some really cool parts of films and an opportunity for credit roll, though the later has become less likely over the years. It is a "ok" place to get a year or two of experience before moving on. I say 'ok' because most other VFX places in the area know what a joke 'The D" is and will actively recruit from them.
Cons
Everyone above the department heads is tone-deaf to the rest of the employees. They'll have floor meetings to quell issues but the best it ever is is lip service or defensive behavior from management. In the last year they forced artists to 'cross-train' into different departments so they could profit off of having artists do 2-3 jobs while keeping pay rates stagnant (~30% below industry standard) and ignoring the additional stress that threw on artists. Hoping employees wouldn't notice and then got confused when long term senior employees started leaving. Ripe with nepotism, I was lucky enough to make friends with the right people but you consistently see weaker artists be promoted since management doesn't want to take strong artists off the floor. Quota and performance only seem to matter if they can use it in there favor. Every decision is about them getting the most amount out of their employees for the least amount of money. Unpaid lunch hours, frequent layoffs, training employees to do higher paying jobs under the 'guise of skill development. There is overtime, but they now make sure its under 44hrs/wk so they don't pay extra, but set quota twice as high anyway. Then pat themselves on the back for "Improving Work/Life Balance" A financial restructure to avoid bankruptcy in 2019, and a lack of planning on transitioning to work from home during Covid has caused additional stress that they instead threw at their employees. 2020 has been a year where we've seen wave after wave of layoffs while salaried management does less work than ever. A general lack of meaningful leadership and downright oppressive work environment, but hey...... they have unlimited Oatmeal, and fruit every other week.
