Pros
-Very little oversight and hard rules. If you like operating without management checking your work, you will like this atmosphere -Casual office culture. No hard dress code. Most employees wear the same polo and khakis every day -Most of the work is low-stakes and very easy to pick up. If you are easily stressed, the monthly/quarterly/annual repetition of survey cycles is predictable and easy to pick up -Some WFH flexibility after you receive a laptop -If management likes you, you can get away with a lot of mistakes and slacking -Most of the lower level employees tend to help each other out and are hard-working and friendly -The startup is slow; this is a good place to spend your first 1-4 years out of college to get some "professional experience". You will learn new project management skills for about a year, and then professional development dead-ends. After that you'll be ground down when you are given more and more projects without additional resources or compensation
Cons
-Favoritism is rampant. Two employees can make the same error and one will be called out during a staff meeting while the other's mistake will be quietly corrected without comment. The difference is whether senior staff personally like you. This also affects salary. Management forbids employees to discuss their salaries. Compensation for a starting position ranges from 50k to 72k, with no discernible pattern based on experience. Asking why is very risky and leads to stonewalling and possibly retaliation. -Lack of professionalism. On multiple occasions employees have been berated like children for not reminding management of deadlines in their own projects, for not knowing things about a project they forgot or neglected to share, and for not acting like their personal secretaries even though that is not in the job description. At least 3 female employees have experienced this. -Inconsistency in rules among staff. Ask different senior staff about a company policy (overtime, subcontractor management, etc.) and you will get completely different answers. Bringing this to their attention does not resolve it and the next employee who asks will receive the same inconsistent answers. -HR is nonexistent, and there is no recourse if you have issues with your colleagues or senior staff. You need to check every paystub to make sure vacation time is added. Health insurance and other important benefits are often delayed or mishandled. -"Annual reviews" are delayed for years, as are the resulting benefits/raises promised to employees. Management claims you will receive backpay for the delay, but only if you're willing to wait a few more years to get it. Your review is based on the feedback from one member of senior staff, even though 90% of the work you do is with junior staff. This feedback completely depends on the staff member you get, and even though you may work on 8-10 projects, your whole review will then be based on the 1-2 projects you work on with that person. In my experience reviews were generally inaccurate, inconsistent, and completely at odds with personal feedback solicited from other survey directors individually. -The hierarchy is simple and 1-way, even when it pretends not to be. An RA can be Project Manager on a project with senior staff, but they have no authority if the senior staff shirk their duties or underperform, which is common, since as an RA your project is low on their priority list. Unless you are in management there is no opportunity to provide feedback about your colleagues or senior staff, even if there is an issue or you ask to. The top executive is invested in hiring more RAs keep the place running at the expense of their mental health, even if they quickly burn out and leave. Turnover is high; in 2 years at least 5 RAs left out of the less than 20-person healthstaff group with replacements were being onboarded in waves. -Work is repetitive, and innovation is frowned upon. Old programs that are outdated that new staff aren't encouraged to learn are carried along because that's what's been used for years. Projects all have roughly the same set of components, outreach methods, data cleaning, reporting, etc. and they basically don't change after they are established. After 1-2 years, the work is fairly mind-numbing.