Exponent Reviews

Pros

Fascinating projects, brilliant colleagues, flexible hours, ability to define your own career, significant value on strong technical competency, beautiful work environment, strong value on creativity and ability to pursue business opportunities

Cons

Limited support for investments in R&D unless there will be a significant return on investment in the near term. Helps to be a self-starter.

Advice to Senior Management

Offer stock options at very low quantities to more junior staff in order to promote pride in organization at all levels.

Pros

Decent salary and flexible hours

Cons

- Out of control egos
 - Junior associates are essentially paralegals
 - Work is hoarded by Senior managers to enhance performance metrics, thereby starving junior associates of valuable experience and growth opportunities
 - Senior managers show extreme favoritism - Choose winners and losers
 - Complete absence of real management. Senior managers focused on hoarding work and maintaining their own performance metrics
 - Professional development is penalized (not compensated for time, performance numbers suffer)
 - Marketing time is penalized (same reason)
 - Earned time off is penalized (same reason)
 - Sick time off is penalized (same reason)

Advice to Senior Management

Don't take young, technical professionals and turn them into paralegals
Invest in your junior associates. Help them to develop into real experts. Don't leave them to claw their way ahead of everyone by the usual means of hoarding and selfishness

Pros

Flexible schedule, compatible pay, uptight management

Cons

Hierarchy stands in the way of getting job done

Advice to Senior Management

New blood.

Pros

Good salary, moderate pressure, reasonable working conditions. Management is extremely poor about giving information and feedback. Overt favoritism on the part of management. Lack of consistency in treatment of employees. Failure to observe and manage problems, with preference going to an "everything is fine" attitude rather than dealing with problems proactively.

Cons

Overpriced benefits, management which threatens rather than enforces standards, Upper Management's obsession with the amount of money they can pile up at the expense of any other consideration.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop being so greedy. It's not always and only about YOU. Think about other people as human beings, not statistics whose only function is to get you another cabin at Tahoe.

Pros

- Some of the individuals were nice

Cons

- Work life and personal life balance
- Never enough work to maintain an adequate UT
          *Therefore the work environment was very competitive
          *There were too many big and unjustifiable egos (e.g. just because you are a "Managing
            Scientist/Engineer" and have a high UT for managing a Principal's case load (e.g. glorified
            administrative work) does not mean you are a stellar scientist or engineer)
- Work that was available to maintain a UT was not interesting (e.g. deposition summaries)
- Penalized for trying to find work because marketing for work was not billable
- Salary - NEVER received a raise
- Expensive and very poor health insurance
- Did not value scientists or engineers who valued the scientific process or scientific principles
          *This was a factory for recruiting individuals with graduate degrees to then just churn out
            hours to make money for the firm
           *The company meetings always focused on revenue and outstanding AR

Advice to Senior Management

*Teach managers how to be managers
*Penalize individuals for hoarding work
*Stop hiring when there is clearly not enough work

Pros

Huge variety of projects, bright people, cushy offices, very few cubicles. Seems to me that most people enjoy their colleagues. Brilliant work is recognized, but it has to be above and beyond and you have to toot your own horn. Great pay. Like a bunch of little companies. Some groups are better than others. Much depends on your individual manager- he (or very, very rarely) she will make or break you.

Cons

Zero respect for your time. You are expected to drop your plans at the last minute due to the poor planning of others. You will be a slave to the Billable Hour. You will be judged solely by the percentage of time you are utilized. Your sick and vacation time count against this percentage. As does non billable time, even if you are working on research or papers your management assigned you. There is an unwritten (but sometimes verbalized) expectation that you eat your overhead hours (work for free). Company is not keen on investing in technology, even at a pathetically small scale. But you can live it up when you travel, no problem.

Advice to Senior Management

You are basically training people to be independent consultants. We have to make our own niches find our own clients, write our own budgets, and even play bill collector if they don't pay on time. Once people realize they could be making 5x what they make if they collected their bill rate themselves, they leave. There's not much incentive to stay. Too many egos, crappy benefits, no social awareness, volunteering scoffed at. Bizarre inter-group conflict/competition. I honestly love the work I do, but it is not enough to make up for all the negatives

Pros

very smart people, very interesting projects.

Cons

not a lot of oppty for advancement.

Advice to Senior Management

good benefits, but people are getting tired of the changes.

Pros

Knoweldgable and intelligent people
Collegial interactions with peers

Cons

Compensation is not competitive
Lack of recognition of accomplishments and performance

Advice to Senior Management

Understand what drives your employees - interesting work is not good enough. Employees like competitive salaries too.

Pros

The job paid pretty well, as compared to other companies for the same position. No micro-managing. They were up-front with me regarding the lack of any advancement opportunities and the possibility of infrequent travel.

Cons

Work/life balance issues. Taking time off for things that cannot be avoided like specialist appointments for children counts against you. Taking time off for vacation was frowned upon, even though you would lose it if you didn't use it up. I never went beyond my allotted time-off, and I always followed company policy, but somehow it came up during review time.
The administrative staff were constantly fighting amongst themselves, often in an unprofessional manor. Management was well aware of it, but wouldn't do anything about it.

Advice to Senior Management

Educate yourselves or your lower management about the advantages of having employees with balanced work/life time. You shouldn't offer someone paid time off as part of their compensation package and then reprimand them when they try to use it according to your own policies.

Pros

large company with lots of access to information

Cons

work yourself to death. Non work/life balance. Horrible management.

Advice to Senior Management

train mangers to manage not just bring in money.