Applied Research Associates Reviews

Pros

- Great work-life balance: support working remotely, taking time off, etc.
- Competitive pay for tech writers and support staff
- Variety: you never know what you'll get to work on next (in a good way)
- Job security: ARA doesn't make a habit of firing people once they're hired

Cons

- Very little upward mobility for tech writers/support staff (see job security). Management positions are filled by the same person for decades. If you want to move into a management position, you'll need to change companies.
- Social interaction is limited. You can go a whole day without seeing anyone, if that's what you're into. Some days it's isolating.

Advice to Senior Management

This is a solid company. It would be great if you could work on reducing the length of time potential hires spend as temps. I know it reduces your tax burden and overall costs, but 2-4 years with no benefits seems excessive.

Pros

You get to work on some very interesting problems

Cons

High pressure with very little appreciation

Pros

Excellent schedule flexibility. Retirement benefits above and beyond those offered at most (if not all) other local companies. Casual dress. No cubicles.

Cons

Management emphasizes that all employees are to perform marketing work, but were no good examples to follow. There was some trouble with stability at the time of my departure.

Advice to Senior Management

Use a separate marketing department and/or hire marketing staff with a good track record that can mentor junior employees. I felt that every marketing meeting was the presentation of the same set of slides on a different template. There was no applied marketing training. Flexibility and office environment is excellent, be sure to keep it as is.

Pros

Work schedule flexibility, pay is somewhat competitive.

Cons

Caustic work environment, lack of cross communication, verbal and public criticisms that are very rarely constructive and reduce morale, out-dated benefits package based on an employee stock plan most employees will never get to benefit from.

Pros

- Benefits are fantastic.
- If you're an engineer or scientist, you are treated very well
- Management is pretty flexible for time off when you need it
- The HR department is very easy to work with when you need to understand something
- It's a very easy place to work
- Despite all the cons I listed, this place is a great place to work. My job is pretty easy for me, and my boss has approved a couple training classes for me.

Cons

- Management definitely played favorites in our department. Particularly if you were a female the boss thought was cute, which I was not.
- Management can be very unclear as to objectives and very unclear as to how they want you to get something done
- The way the chain of command is structured, you'll often end up with a supervisor that has no understanding of your job duties, but still has to grade your performance based on what THEY understand you did
- If you're not an engineer or a scientist, you're just another support staff peon and you definitely know it.
- Support staff like IT, HR, and Accounting are regularly thrown under the bus by their managers
- Typically, once you're in a position at this company, that's it; there's no real room to move up and the raises (at least for my department) were just really low.
- Don't listen when they tell you that you can get college assistance. You only get reimbursed for the individual classes that your boss finds relevant to your job title, so about 90% of the time, you get turned down.

Advice to Senior Management

1. Reorganize the lower chains of command so people aren't having their performance reviews done by someone who really has no idea what your job is every day.
2. Encourage engineers and scientists to stop treating the support staff like doormats. We do our jobs well, and you need us.
3. Be upfront about the benefits when you interview people. The package is great without you being misleading.
4. When people bring an issue to management where your boss is playing favorites and is mistreating his employees, don't tell us "Let's just wait and see how it works out." If managers don't take care of their employees, more of us are going to go straight to HR with our issues.

Pros

Benefit package is OK but it takes 3 years to become vested. Very dependent on local work environment. Good job experience and HR is great. Local management is very influential - this can be both a good and bad thing

Cons

Unskilled middle management allowed hostile work environment- bully behavior accepted as ok. ARA culture is great but local team leader is fearful of something. At this level I do not expect a response of "I don't want your opinion I just what you to do this when I say and how I say". This is not a respectful work place. Ideas are repressed. Management tried to manipulate skill set to meet contract as opposed to marketing skills and expand contract access as indicated in interview.

Advice to Senior Management

Market human capital as stated in mission. Not try to change skills to fit contract.

Pros

ARA has a strong engineering culture and generally tries to hire people who are passionate about the work.

They also are very open to new market opportunities, and encourage individual initiative.

Because the company primarily does "small" government contracts, there is a lot of chance at intra- and inter-company collaboration, which means you get to try new things.

Cons

It's a government contractor, so you generally can't work on anything that you can't get money for up front. You also have to deal with inordinate amounts of bureaucracy from "The Customer."

"Everybody markets" is the slogan - and marketing is prioritized over engineering. If someone is bringing in new contracts, it doesn't matter how bad they are at engineering or teamwork.

Advice to Senior Management

Having a large number of people cooperating and working on several small projects seems to work really well - smaller office groups get pigeonholed and become too inward-looking. I don't think the "group" level should be the delimiter for project teams.

Pros

Surrounded by a lot of smart, motivated people. Excellent benefits. They care about the customer and produce quality work. Good software development process. The office and facilities are first class - most people have their own office. The administrative support staff is helpful. I have autonomy to do my job and no one micromanages me. Every two years all the technical staff gather in one city/location for a technical conference - this is very cool!

Cons

Product releases are stressful due to "war-room" environment (but kind of fun too). Some bureaucracy involved in government contracting like daily time-sheets and things like that.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep winning the good projects.

Pros

Lots of small-team, short-timescale projects, so you get a lot of hands-on experience coding.
Smarter tech workers than your average government contractor.
Good benefits.
Management is largely ex-technical workers, so they're more inclined to not be idiots.

Cons

Career advancement requires customer marketing and project management - including all the boring parts like accounting and personnel management. Hope you don't like actually making software too much!
Company as a whole might be very diverse, but most projects done at any one division are in a very narrow focus.

Advice to Senior Management

Enable communication throughout the company as a whole - being one part of a conglomerate means there are probably plenty of fun and cool opportunities for collaboration getting missed.

Pros

Employees have lots of personal freedom in how they do the job and there is a wide variety of projects. If you're into technical sales and marketing you can do really well. You get to use a lot of different technology and interact with the clients. Great retirement benefits.

Cons

Development planning in non existent, just do or die. The corporate culture really encourges workaholics if you want to climb the ladder. Much of your compensation is in company stock in the retirement plan so the pay tends to be somewhat below average.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on getting some larger/long term projects to increase stability. Create a technical career path that doesn't require people to move into management to get promoted.