Pros
- Traction does a great job hiring bright, funny, and amazing personalities. They are the foundation of the entire company. - Colleagues are eager and quick to help one another with work related problems. - Ridiculously fast pace and loose management practices have a positive edge; incredibly fast upskilling on Salesforce and consulting best practices. You will develop amazing skills to take to your next employer. - Free lunch was good until they decided to offer half portions, 4 days per week instead of 5. That all stopped during COVID-19
Cons
COMPENSATION: No one talks about it, but everyone knows about it. The pay for consultants is harrowing. 20-25% below industry standard. WORK-LIFE BALANCE: Originally pitched as ‘work-life harmony’ you’ll be eased into a standard 40-hour work week but will quickly be expected to work more than that, investing your weekends, evenings, and lunch time to achieve billable work targets. Challenging this will leave you with a response of “that’s how consulting is” despite the conflicting onboarding rhetoric of being a ‘unique’ consultancy. They aren't. There is no balance. Your life is work and your work is life. FUEL: The name for the half-baked compensation/raise program that allots tiny budgets to teams with the façade-like promise of being given a raise more often (quarterly vs annually). The truth of the matter is this system is based on arbitrary, subjective, and biased measures that leave your best chance at a raise in the palms of a General Manager who either loves you or hates you. That hinges on whether you are an egoless disciple of the cult-like culture at Traction. The model inherently enables bias and that absolutely comes through, quarterly. It's broken and no one is interested in fixing it. UNMANAGED MANAGEMENT: There are some amazing managers at Traction. If you are lucky enough to find a squad that is led by a competent person then you should be happy. If you land a manager who is the converse of that, I send my thoughts and prayers. There are few measures to ensure that management is managing consistently or effectively. Troubles, concerns, etc.. are seldom passed to upper management, which dismantles functional-level employee confidence in what a future at Traction looks like. OUR MONEY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOUR BILLS: Traction handled the COVID-19 pandemic abysmally. One day we heard that there will be no layoffs. A little more than 24 hours later a good chunk of the workforce was laid-off (200 employees, gone, bye bye). The claims from upper management and execs were that this was a temporary and precautionary measure to ensure that there was enough free cash to keep the business operationally profitable. Many employees were not brought back after the temporary lay-off. In that time, Traction seemingly purchased talent from another company. STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES ARE NOT STANDARD: Things are run very differently on the same roles from team to team. There is no standard process of management. This leads to frustrating amounts of ambiguity amongst staff. EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK IS SELECTIVELY VALUED: You are expected to log your sentiment in a platform called Pulse. If you’re honest with the wrong manager your feedback can be used against you.