Pros
Everyone always says the people and the group chats and I cannot echo this enough. I have met some of the greatest people at this job. These people continue to be some of my closest friends even after they’ve all left Exiger. As the great moral philosopher Rhianna once said “we found love in a hopeless place.”
Kontras
There is a piece of me that genuinely believes that Exiger is, essentially, an example of what could have happened with the Stanford Prison Experiment if it had been unregulated, in a corporate setting, and allowed to play out indefinitely. People are chosen, not by skill, but by obsequiousness, to take on managerial positions where they oversee the work of others. They have no formal training in people management and the totality of their professional development is LinkedIn Learning courses they were forced to take. Leadership openly accuses researchers of lying or of being lazy, while literally going to bakeries in the middle of the day to get cupcakes. Generally speaking, few know how to speak to people with respect. Those who have worked here for a long time have been degraded so much that they just think that’s how one should communicate. Leadership and management don’t do anything because most of them got to their positions through nepotism, threatening litigation, or sheer delusion. These people have nothing to lose and, as a result, go off the rails constantly. Nasty comments are not the only reason why people have complete mental breakdowns. Sometimes people would just buckle under the sheer volume of work they had. In the beginning, when you’re eager to please, you will be guilted into doing more. Management will make it sound like you’re being a hero or being part of the cause. When the guilt doesn’t work anymore, you’re just forced to do extra work under the guise of “flex.” Your work will never be valued and every extra case, every extra paragraph, extra sentence, extra word you write is another opportunity for someone to criticise or berate you. No one does anything about this. Everyone knows this place runs on a combination of collective anxiety and fear and deep down they know that this company is a report mill with the sole goal of churning out mediocre reports “at the speed of trust.” I firmly believe that many people who work at Exiger would benefit greatly from talking with a trained healthcare professional. Many of the leaders of the diligence business unit, and certain parts of the sales team, are living in a delusion. This is not to say that they are delusional in the pejorative sense, I mean it strictly by the textbook definition in that they hold idiosyncratic beliefs or impressions that are not supported by reality. But, a consequence of this skewed world view is that they very often use elements of mental and emotional abuse, such as gaslighting, in order to preserve their rather fragile sense of reality. Perhaps the most obvious form of this is the Glassdoor Witch Hunts, which are exactly what they sound like. Whenever a negative review of the company goes up, which for a time was every other day, management goes through an extensive fishing expedition on who could have possibly written the review. Some literally go as far as blasting entire group chats with questions like “have you heard anyone use the term ‘trauma bonding’ before?” It would honestly be pretty funny if it wasn’t utterly horrifying. Honestly, Franz Kafka would be proud. Another example is the “Reply All Public Shaming.” By nature of the number of handoffs we have to do, each case is attached to a fairly extensive email chain, which can sometimes include upwards to 20 people. Some folks loved to openly humiliate people by sending criticism, some uncalled for, to the whole chain. Perhaps the most ironic thing about all of that are many of the Reply All Shamers are now in leadership positions where they are literally overseeing permanence managers. You can’t make this type of dysfunction up. This company also suffers from a serious lack of diversity. There are very few people of color doing research and almost no people of color in management positions. What is even more insulting is that white people, with very little international knowledge in some cases, are making decisions for countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. I love listening to someone with no knowledge of Africa explain to me why we can treat Kenya and Somalia the same in terms of the research process or why there’s no real differences between Japan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Exiger is literally a dehumanizing place. Researchers are reduced to a quality metric score, which is derived from reviewers who score researchers based on their research and writing, however, there is no consistency with how individual reviewers decide on what scores to give. Because of these scores, many researchers who did not need performance related interventions were forcibly placed on plans that micromanaged every hour of their work day. They would email their manager when they got into work, when they did reports, when they went to lunch, when they finished reports, when they left for the day, how much they got done that day…. You get the drift. At the same time, a large proportion of real underperformers got to continue underperforming to their hearts’ content.
