FactSet – “Bad Place to Work”

Pros

Free Soda though it's mostly with caffeine so you work harder.
Free Lunch though it's done for you to work during lunch. You work during your 1 hr lunch break for $8/hr.

Cons

**Phil Hadley is clueless about a number of products. He only knows what he told by others. Most of the upper-mgmt just tell him what he wants to hear, hoping to keep on working till their screw ups get discovered. If he actually visited with the consultants and specialists, he would actually see what needs to be done to grow FactSet.

**It's all about selling. They will hire/promote you as a consultant or specialist and tell you your job is account management. If you work on a hard product, you will then become the de-facto sales person. The sales generalist won't want to understand your product, so you will be doing cold calls rather than just building and strengthening existing clients/doing demos/trainings/support.. what you were hired for. Say you do get a lead by a cold call. Then you need to bring the generalist who has done very little. If it goes good, they get the credit. If it goes bad, you get the blame.

**The company isn't good for a resume. If you put JP Morgan or Bloomberg on your resume it's gold. Putting FactSet on your resume doesn't do much.

**Not many promotion opportunities. In consulting you either become a mid-level consulting mgr or a sales person and eventually a sales mgr. Only engineering really has a career path but that is mostly by nicer titles.

**They will now nickle and dime you. Blackberries are being taken away. Reimbursement for internet when you need to work from home is no longer done.
To get your graduate class paid for, you need to pass the CFA (3 yr + test). To take the CFA, you need to work there 2 years. So 5 yrs of working there just to get a class paid for.

Advice to Senior Management

Have Phil actually visit the consultants and specialists for every product. Something simple like one product a week. Go on a client visit or two to see current needs vs needs when he did it back in the 90s.