To be honest, I wouldn't say it is, but I spent 3 years looking for work before I even got an interview here, and I nailed the interview.

At that point, I wasn't going to walk away from it even if they had made me sign over my first-born son, but with that having been said, I've worked with some of the best people I've ever known. Without exaggerating, I've loved my colleagues. There's a sense of camaraderie and family that I've never experienced anywhere else, and I've enjoyed the actual work (editing/graphic design).

As you might expect based on the rule I mentioned, the worst part about it is the many various bureaucratic elements that impede anyone from ever making any real progress outside of the "put out the same fires, day in and day out" sort of way.

If the pay was better I'd be better equipped to overlook the bureaucratic stuff, but honestly, I think a lot of people end up staying despite the non-competitive pay because the sense of community is so strong you don't want to leave the people hanging you've come to think of as friends and damn-near as family because you left and now the "too much for one person" workload you already had will have to be distributed among those that remain, adding onto theirs.

It served its purpose: get me enough work experience so that my resume doesn't get totally ignored when I apply for jobs, get me some professional references, and get me some training to flush out my repertoire.

Plus, full-disclosure, around half the folks that work there break those rules and just don't talk about it. They don't drug test or anything, so the rule, in practice, is more of a "if you decide to do stuff that we frown upon, don't talk about it at work and hide it from your colleagues," rather than "if you ever do this we will fire you." Most of the people who got fired because of it had other conflicts going on with administration, and this just happened to be the fire-able offense that they got caught doing. I had a colleague who was a gay atheist who was pretty open about what he did in his free time when it came to drinking and partying, but when he was in the office he was professional and that was enough for him to be one of the most respected people in the office- he had the work ethic and foundation of knowledge to back it up.