Pros
My direct team is wonderful
Cons
I want to start this by saying that I am not a disgruntled ex-employee who is just writing this review out of anger. I genuinely wish this company would be better, but all indications suggest that it never will be and that their only interest is their bottom line, not their people. Unfortunately, there are just so many things wrong with this company. 1. Flat company. There is zero organization here. No clear growth paths exist because it's essentially just you and your same-level colleagues under a supervisor. My supervisor is constantly overwhelmed because there's nothing between them and the rest of us, so all questions go to them, new employee training is their responsibility, and there are tons of things that they don't actually need to be doing, but there's no one else to do it because the role responsibilities are undefined. I have suggested multiple times that we create some more structure, offering to take on more responsibilities to help them out, but nothing has been done. This is not my supervisor's fault. The company simply does not care about its employees and does not listen to feedback (if they did, these kinds of reviews wouldn't exist). Because my supervisor is constantly overwhelmed, they are often not readily available or able to help with things that really do need their attention quickly. Again, I don't blame them at all, but it can get very frustrating when I need their help and can't get it because they're stuck doing 700 other menial tasks that should be someone else's responsibility. Also, expect to do other people's work because of this. For example, instead of finance chasing POs or emailing clients regarding payment issues, they will email you to do that work. I'm not entirely sure what finance actually does, to be honest. 2. Lack of care for employees. The CEO joins the weekly meetings, often to threaten our jobs pretty directly. This has happened at least five times in the last two years. I don't think I really need to explain how that is not a good motivator. I and my colleagues have made many suggestions over the years, including very simple and easily implemented solutions, and none of them have ever been taken into consideration, let alone implemented. All you get is lip service and gaslighting. No one has ever actually asked me or my colleagues what we'd like to do for team building or other activities; they are simply thrust upon us whether we like it or not. Speaking of which, outside of work "fun" is basically mandatory, and if you try to decline, you may get a call from the CEO trying to coerce you into going anyway. Also, if you're a remote worker and are invited to visit the office in Boston, be prepared to have a roommate! They won't put you up in a hotel because they'd rather use their corporate apartments or AirBnB and have you share the space with at least one other employee, who you may never have met before. Extremely unprofessional and sketchy. If you request your own private accommodation, you will get pushback and your trip may just be cancelled. Also, trips are put together last minute, so don't expect much advance notice, but do expect to be pressured into coming regardless of whatever else you may already have scheduled. 3. Workload and turnover. The turnover rate is so high here that you are likely to be constantly overloaded because they just won't hire more people. About a year ago, my supervisor's counterpart on the other side of the division left. They have not been replaced. In the time I've been here, I have seen at least 6 employees leave, and several of them were in upper management positions. They just haven't been replaced, so all their work has been distributed to other already very busy employees. 4. Money money money. I genuinely believe that all the CEO cares about is money and does not care what shady or unprofessional things have to be done to get it. Which is strange, because she makes very confusing business decisions that lead me to believe she actually has no idea how to run a company. For many clients, we have no minimum fees and no rush charges, but of course many of our vendors (there are not many - more on that below) do have minimum fees. Furthermore, instead of implementing these fees or raising our client rates, the response to inflation was to assemble a team to ask our vendors to accept rates even lower than their already-low rates. Obviously, this was not received well by our linguists and damaged many relationships. This was done after multiple employees discouraged the idea, knowing it would lead to exactly what it has: vendor dissatisfaction and disengagement. Speaking of which, the payment terms for vendors are so long it's ridiculous and insulting. The process: PMs should not create POs until work is delivered. Once POs are created, the vendor needs to go onto the (very outdated and finicky) platform and "accept" the PO. There is then a waiting period of about a month before the PM can confirm the PO (manually, so this is an extra admin step the PM has to take into account). Once the PO is confirmed, then the vendor can actually invoice, after which there is another waiting period based on terms with the vendor (often another month) before the vendor will actually get paid. As you can imagine, this is a needlessly complicated and lengthy process that does not inspire confidence with our vendors or motivate them to work with us. I actually know of one PM who just hasn't been issuing POs and has ignored emails from linguists. Upper management knows about this and has done nothing. I guess they're hoping the linguists eventually give up so they don't have to pay them for their work. It's also rather strange to be so obsessed with money, but then wanting remote workers to visit the office regularly where they spend tons on elaborate dinners (though, of course, they're cheap about that too, as I already described). Also, don't bother asking for a raise. You'll get the runaround and have to push over and over for weeks to get a real answer, which will probably be "no" or a miniscule amount. 5. Lack of resources. As I already mentioned, the high turnover rate means that there is always a lack of employees, so we are always scrambling to try and handle the workload. Another factor in this is that we have very few linguistic resources. The vendor lists usually have two or three vendors on them, but it is a regular occurrence that only one of those vendors is responsive and reliable. This means that we essentially have no options, and placing projects with linguists becomes very difficult. We are also discouraged from using agencies, but, again, given no resources. Any time this lack of resources is brought up, we are told they're working on it, or to reach out to the vendor management team to help place something. In theory, that makes sense, but in practice, it means wasting time asking for resources, who may or may not get back to us when we are already working with absurdly short timelines. Our relationships with the good linguists we do have has been soured by the aforementioned response to inflation. The rates we have for vendors are frankly insulting, and asking them to accept worse rates caused many of them to simply stop taking projects, meaning even fewer resources in our already tiny pool. Furthermore, we are encouraged to use cheaper vendors, knowing that they are less reliable and of worse quality than our preferred vendors. They literally only care about spending less money. And, if they had any business sense at all and any desire to put in real work rather than finding cheap, shady "solutions", they would be able to make more money with higher quality and happier people. It's really very easy, but it takes a lot of work and care, which this company is clearly unwilling to do.