Ares Management Reviews

Pros

competitive salary, free food, great area

Cons

Ares has unrealistic expectations of you. They want you to work long hours, do not incentivise. They get angry if you ask questions when you are first learning a process. Basically, they just want you to be perfect and understand their convolluded systems and methods instantly. Good luck if you are not entering with a wheelhouse of corporate experience. If you are not, have fun getting chewed out.

Advice to Senior Management

Understand that people are not robots. Need to implement better training techniques with clearer expectations of people. Show more respect to people below you.

Pros

High salary and benefits. Nice office.

Cons

Stress so high it will affect your health. Extreme disrespect from management. Verbal abuse.

Advice to Senior Management

If you care about the constant loss/turnover of talent in the finance/accounting area, make a change in management.

Pros

Free lunch, beautiful office, and access to tons of technology.

Cons

Management is horrible and micro-managers (either you have managers that can't plan anything or you have managers that want 50k steps to change a hard disks). Incredibly long hours followed up by zero thanks for working hard. Overall the place is run with management by fear. Consequently moral is horrible, people are scared, and thus the stress is extreme.

Advice to Senior Management

Take a step back and stop purely worrying about the bottom line. Spend some money on employee moral and making the team stronger. During my time at Ares, the only training was a half baked APM training (Ares Project Management). The top people at Ares make more than 8 digits a year, make the people on the bottom actually feel proud to come to work.

Pros

Spectacular view of the Hollywood Hills, rarified atmosphere in ultra modern Century City. Catered lunches, wonderful coffee. Exposure to all phases of business (dys) function.

Cons

Strongly discouraged to share information, employees are expected to put in long hours re-inventing the wheel as a substitute for any vision of how information systems should be built. My experience with line managers were that they were extremely arrogant and dim-witted and have neither grasp of bank instruments or knowledge of project management. Testing consisited of putting code into production and cursing. Silos of parochial knowledge.

Advice to Senior Management

Develop a vision which encourages communication and information sharing instead of high-ceremony events like catered Saturdays