Pros
- The people are incredibly smart, and you will learn a lot. - The difficulty of the job makes you extremely prepared for other roles in market research.
Kontras
- Nonsensical time tracking: This company made me swear off any jobs that required me to track project hours. If we did not have enough work, we were basically encouraged to lie about our project hours to keep utilization high. At the same time, employees were reprimanded for skewed margins since a high amount of time was being charged to projects. Make it make sense. - Unhealthy hyper-fixation on utilization: While we're on the topic, let's deep dive into utilization a bit more. Management truly misused this metric, with absolutely zero benefit to employees. In my opinion, utilization should have been used to 1) understand how we should pursue new business opportunities 2) balance projects through each business unit properly. Ultimately, utilization was used to tell employees they were not doing enough, resulting in unrealistic expectations around project hours. Basically, schedules were stacked with 8+ hours of work (which always resulted in overtime, considering the fact that if anything additional came up, you'd have to stay late). The way the company calculated utilization didn't even make sense. Mandatory holidays and PTO (including sick days) lowered your utilization, resulting in the need to "make up" for those hours in order to keep your utilization high. I reiterate--make it make sense. - Terrible work-life balance: Piggybacking off my last point, the work-life balance was truly terrible. Working 10-12 hour days was a regular occurrence. Be prepared to receive messages over the weekend and emails late at night or super early in the morning. I've been in meetings where people openly joked about working 60+ hour weeks for months. Smells like Stockholm Syndrome. - Pay does not match expectations: If salaries were extremely competitive, my previous points would have been *somewhat* more excusable. However, salaries were average at best, bordering abysmal due to a long pay freeze (unsure the status of this since I no longer work there). And of course, no overtime pay despite always having to work overtime. Cool! - Obnoxious leadership: Oh brother, where do I begin? Senior leadership, I am speaking to you directly: Stop trying to be quirky and relatable during important company meetings. I don't want to hear about your kids making fart jokes during an All Hands. I want to know whether I'll be able to afford rent next year. Hope this helps! All jokes aside, this job severely impacted my mental health. After accepting a new role, I found it difficult to forget the high-stress mindset that I learned here, and I was pretty on edge despite my new employer being considerably more chill. It took awhile for me to not have anxiety closing my laptop at 5pm sharp. Needless to say, quitting was one of the best things I did for myself.