Getty Images Reviews

Pros

Very dynamic company, never boring. Bright and usually passionate people. Excellent products. Good company culture. Excom for all but one position from internal promotions.Lean organization.

Cons

Salary, not always what you'd expect. Somewhat too lean in various operational areas.

Advice to Senior Management

Do more to grow future leaders of the business, as well as to support current management in the development of their skills.

Pros

everybody out the door by 5pm
very low pressure - 0 urgency to get anything done on time
great location and comfortable office
people and personalities are generally agreeable and entirely unremarkable

Cons

Management spends months talking about product roadmaps but not even the simplest projects get done. The site looks and works exactly the same as it did 4-5 years ago

Co-workers are unmotivated - there are several people who have been there 7+ years with no promotions and no aspirations to go beyond their current roles and responsibilities

The peer review seems more like an opportunity to backstab co-workers than provide constructive well-rounded criticism.

as a previous reviewer mentioned, employees often 'get disappeared' and are simply never seen again.

Advice to Senior Management

Getty is simply a company in a tailspin that isn't making any material efforts to save themselves. They like to talk roadmaps and handout little books on management de jour, but when it comes time to get accountable, everybody disappears. if it wasn't for the acquisition of istockphoto and allowing that business to run unmolested, Getty would have packed it up awhile ago.

advise to any potential acquirers - PASS or gut that management from Director Level up.

Pros

- making and selling great products
- people workig there feel very passionate about creating new digital media
- cool and relaxed atmosphere
- not too many politics, even if the secret is to make key connections with people
- not too many big egos
- variety and work is far from monotonous

Cons

- restructures are frequent as the industry is evolving quickly and sometimes unpredictably
- tough competition
-incertain teams there's no much career opportunities as people tend to stay a very long time
- long time needed to understand the business at the start
- salaries are not as high as in similar roles in other industries

Advice to Senior Management

- management quality can vary from function to function
- sometimes the senior managerial teams do not show enough strengh during tough times and are far removed from the teams, other times are great
- to get the job it depends on you know and not on what you know

Pros

company benefits are good (healthcare etc)

Cons

unfair/unequal treatment of employees, management team very disassociated from reality of workers

Pros

The people are generally nice, the benefits are good. You can have a good work-life balance working for this company.

Cons

The company is for sale and most teams and resources are focused on reducing operational costs to make the bottom line look better to potential buyers. Many long-time employees have been let go, entire teams are being outsourced. There is no longer any pride or upside to working at this company, the most talented people have already left and there is an ongoing exodus of the people that remain. This is a dead end career for all but the senior managers that own stock and stand to cash out when the company is bought or goes public. It would be a big mistake to think you can advance your career at Getty Images in Seattle.

Advice to Senior Management

Management knows what is going on, they don't need any advice. I no longer have any respect for management at this company.

Pros

The reputation of the product overall is solid. 401k benefits do not have a vesting period, so whatever you get, you keep. Salaries are competitive. Some (not all) team members are allowed to work from home when they need to.

Cons

Employees are treated as completely disposable. People disappear all the time--laid off, fired, or just simply leave, and announcements of such things (even within one's own work group) are not made. It's very disorienting. And it's a consensus among employees that this is by design. Executive and senior management seem to enjoy ruling through a chaos and intimidation culture. Extreme hierarchy attitudes are omnipresent. They hire very talented and experienced people then treat them like entry-level worker bees who are kept in a state of confusion. Due to a bizarre micro-management vibe, people's confidence begins deteriorating within about 6 months, if not sooner. So anyone who is truly competent in their field starts looking elsewhere. Middle management has very little formal training and it shows. But you can hardly expect them to excel when they are being treated poorly by senior management--the negativity flows downhill. There is zero trust of senior management. It's well known that there are some folks at the senior level who enjoy their power a little too much and use it to intimidate the masses into submission. If you disagree, you will be fired. It happens all the time. I have worked for several major companies in Seattle and have never seen so many competent people get fired. There is no employee-to-management feedback opportunity. This tells us it is not important to executive and senior management how the employees are faring in their work and job satisfaction. Horrible open concept workspace which means it's impossible to concentrate and relax. Incessant re-orgs (which proves senior leadership doesn't know what they are doing) and desk shuffling which makes full-time employees feel like temporary workers.

Advice to Senior Management

Investigate and take seriously the micro-management culture and put an end to it. There are "Getty product owners" (i.e. the CEOs of our sister sites) who believe it is their job to design web sites, not just communicate business goals--nitpicking and bullying the creative teams whose job it is to design quality consumer experiences. These "leaders" don't know their roles and it is destructive to creative and development teams. It is a complete mystery to many of us how these people are qualified for their positions. Everyone's confidence is diminished and people feel they have to fight and risk being fired to assert the ideas and experience they bring to the table. It's a terrible waste of talent. To senior management: Stop coming up with wacky new ideas that force all significant project work to stop and demoralize your global teams. Professional people are most happy when they are allowed to produce work they are proud of and be recognized for it. Being pitted against your coworkers in ridiculous, ill-conceived contests that derail months worth of project work does nothing but destroy morale. The company is entirely too "Dev heavy"--the technical teams should not set the parameters, pace and tone of new work. Agile, which it's pretty clear senior management at Getty does not truly understand, is being used to stifle productivity instead of enhance it. And it is only being used to benefit the development side. This destructive imbalance is another reason people always have their ears to the ground for other job opportunities. And most importantly, if you do care about employee work satisfaction, do an annual review where we can all comment on how we feel about the state of the company and the performance of management.

Pros

The employees were awesome and I have kept many people as friends since I left the company. It offers a fun and casual work environment. I've known many people who had left the company for a period of time, but then returned to work at Getty again. I think this is indicative of a good company when ex-employees are willing to return. The Seattle office is modern and is located in Fremont, which is a great neighborhood. Stock photography is a cool and great product to support and Getty continues to be in the forefront in creating innovative products. They offer a good healthcare/benefits package.

Cons

The workload was chaotic at times due to on-going layoffs and the salary was mediocre. Management was not always supportive of professional growth or nurturing career advancement, but that may not be the case for all departments. Unfortunately, due to the niche industry, it has been difficult to seek work elsewhere because other employers do not understand how stock photography is transferrable to their industry. In this current job market, many employers are wanting relateable industry experience and unless they're familiar with Getty or stock, they tend to view the company as just a regular photography company. Although I understand the economic climate, Getty's reasons for laying off people or entire departments weren't always well thought out. The CEO even admitted that one of his biggest regrets was laying off an entire group where he lost a lot of industry knowledge.
Parking in the building is $80/mo, unless you're willing to scour the city streets for parking each morning. They try to encourage being green, for example, riding your bike to work or offering free or discounted bus passes, but yet are not very supportive of telecommuting or flexible work hours.

Advice to Senior Management

I feel that many of the strategic initiatives are made in haste. Although I understand the pace in which this industry works, I feel the pendulum always swung a little too far. Your decisions were reactive to fix one issue, but this resulted in bleeding somewhere else. I think having a more balanced view on the entire business, rather than putting your entire focus on one part of the business is the key. Trust your employees and not just senior management to run your business.

Pros

If you are lucky enough to have a great manager who does not micro manage you to death then your experience should be fine but unfortunately great managers are short and few ! They have a lot of " YES MEN and WOMEN " so if you can tolerate that then use Getty as a stepping stone to something else .

Cons

Not a lot of sound decisions were made through out my time working for them . They ( upper management ) tend to get it after the fourth or fifth time but after alot of money was spent and tons of great talent being laid off . Senior management tends to treat the sales teams much differently from the rest of the non sales departments to the point it seems like a caste system . They have gotten rid of most of the people who know the ins and outs of the product /site and policy ( i am speaking in a technology/content/function ) and they love to outsource as much as possible ( good luck with clients needing to speak to someone for support - sales teams are great but they tend to hire them straight out of college and with no digital photography experience and sales teams are swamped with information so they used to rely on content teams for assistance but thats none existent now ) .
Departments dont share information with each other and they are very territorial about that information , causing redundancy of work .

Advice to Senior Management

Understand that your product is as good as the people you have working for you ... Yes we are in a recession and budgets are tight but keep in mind that the recession is not going to be forever so stand by your staff . Before you lay someone off , see if that person is leaving the company with valuable information. I had seen a large brain drain occur in GI and in multiple offices ( NYC-Seattle-Chicago-London ) and its a shame because you have lost a some highly dedicated individuals . Your loss is another company's gain .

Pros

Good people, good clients, when sales are good everyone is happy

Cons

management will try anything and doesn't always think it through

Advice to Senior Management

Stick with something longer than 6 months

Pros

The content and the people (co workers)

Cons

That if you get fired from Getty there are not many companies to work for as Getty has bought out just about every one in the market. such a Monopoly has created an ill market but as I see it if Getty keeps cutting services to clients as they are God willing this Company will crumble and many more small agencies will turn up creating a healthy market in this industry, No more than five years.

Advice to Senior Management

to treat employees with respect and dignity, and to learn some personal skills