Fantastic Place to Work, But Some Real Issues Remain
Pros
Great place to be as a research analyst, especially if you are in an area of high client demand and management attention. You work with incredibly smart people, get to interact with a wide range of clients and at least in my opinion, have a great work/life balance. The trick is to simply be on top of your calendar. The vacation and benefits are top-notch and the sales team, has definitely improved. If you know what metrics you are being measured on (and work to get good metrics), you are willing to take stretch inquiries and you become a friend of the sales team, promotions will happen.
Cons
There are still some real issues. Promoting top-performing 24 year-old AEs to manager isn't a great idea. As analysts, we can see the impact on AEs when they don't have a good manager and it causes extra work for us and pain for the client. The stack ranking system does seem unfair and some of the metrics really don't make sense. But I have been the beneficiary of it because I simply accept it and work to ensure my metrics are really good. They have plenty of dashboards to track everything, so you can benchmark yourself against everyone else. When it comes to internal use of technology and processes, the company should ask the analysts that cover those spaces for advice rather than operating in a vacuum. Finally, there are still some biases towards end-user research and that doesn't make sense given the changes in the market.
