Pros
- Lots of training for new employees
-Culture encourages teamwork over competition
- Lots of opportunities for leadership at the start of your career
- Rewards and supports employees for their hard work with EOY bonuses representative of effort and recognition awards at holiday parties and monthly meetings
-Large diversity of projects to work on
-Many talented coworkers willing to help you out (not just in your office, but nationwide)
- Groups for women and minorities to join and find community
- HR is very on top of onboarding and off boarding procedures. Very communicative and kind team, but I didn’t feel comfortable being honest about my experience until I put in my two weeks notice.
Cons
- Internship experience across multiple regions projects a dishonest “9 to 5” experience because of hourly billing (interns are discouraged to work overtime)
- If you need work-life balance, this is not the place for you. Once your billing becomes salaried (full-time not intern), you are expected to prioritize your work over everything else (unless you have a medical emergency). Team workload meetings often projected hours into the 50-60+ hours/week, every week I worked there, for every employee on the team. Sometimes hours were even in the 70+ hours/week.
- The office I worked in had about 150+ employees and I only saw about 5-10 employees taking a lunch break on a daily basis. The majority of people worked through lunch and ate at their desk.
- The private break rooms were nice, but no one used them unless they were nursing and even those that were nursing would work in the rooms instead of taking a break.
- I felt guilty for taking a mental break, because most of my coworkers would work 10-12+ hour days and not take any breaks (even for lunch). Sometimes our team would have fun, group conversations but it was only about 1x/day or every few days.
- On my exit interview, Utilization Time was an option on the drop down as a reason for leaving. So many people have asked management for a change to their UT, and saw no change, that they had to leave the company. Because of the company’s high UT (utilization time) goal, employees are expected to spend a certain amount of total hours in a year working on billable (client projects). This does not include any team bonding meetings, efforts to improve team efficiency, or lunch breaks, because they cannot be billed directly to a client project. Therefore, many people are discouraged from spending much time, if at all, on team bonding during work hours, lunch, or improving team efficiency. We were given a lot of vacation, but if we were to use it, we’d have to work extra hard to meet our high UT goals. This is why most of our workloads projected individual hours into the 50-60+ hours/week. The UT goals were what they were because that is what employees needed to maintain the business’ financial health. It was a very profit over people environment, even though they did try to reward and recognize employees where they could.
- Upper management / my more experienced coworkers often worked more hours than me. I would see them staying late into the evenings many nights or coming in very early every day.
- Rigid start time of 7:30 AM, but no rigid end time, so technically you could work forever and that would be acceptable.
-WFH is discouraged, even though every employee is given a laptop computer connected to the company server