FactSet Reviews

Pros

Great place to launch a career. The atmosphere is challenging and energetic, and the FactSetters are always helpful.

Cons

Training program is sparse if you aren't an engineer or consultant.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide more thorough training classes for the new hires.

Pros

-excellent exposure to all aspects of the business (being proactive helps a lot)
-company cares for its employees with good perks, 401k matching, and plenty of open communication from HR
-excellent communication lines across different groups
-very little red tape ; rewards proactive personalities
-opportunity to work with smart people
-meetings with management
-open culture
-stable firm

Cons

-salary may be less competitive
-not as many growth opportunities

Advice to Senior Management

If you feel that you are not talking enough to your direct reports or if you don't hear from them, take measures to change that.

Pros

Free lunch. Flexibility. If you put your time in and meet your goals, you can work independently. Team environment. Positive young company.

Cons

Probably could be higher in pay. Senior management isn't as involved as they should be with the day to day and have a mentality of "nice job, but let's get to the next goal" Their goals are not always realistic.

Advice to Senior Management

Spend more time with consultants and sales to understand the challenges facing the day to day work. Also be understanding of current enviroment and difficulty it presents for selling.

Pros

- Relaxed environment
- Working from home
- Free lunch

Cons

- Career progression is non-existent
- Stuck in a cube all day long
- Salary increases are small and as there are no promotions, how are you going to get a higher salary.
- PD skills aren't transferable to another company

Advice to Senior Management

Provide training that is recognised.

Pros

* Great health insurance, dental, 401k
* Free lunch from Mon - Thu
* Free drinks and snacks
* Very healthy environment
* Rapid growth
* Pay for CFA

Cons

* Path of growth is limited; Specialist just means you're a support and sales hybrid

* The quality of Development and Engineers are so inconsistent. A few are sheer geniuses and too many inept developers and engineers.

* Development and engineering structure does not make sense; lack of cohesive development process.
Why are we recreating features in other applications that we already have in existing applications?

* I feel bad for our clients when they face very buggy softwares and bad quality data.

Advice to Senior Management

Development needs critical help. A lot of people from acquired firms get promoted to higher development positions even they are ill-equipped for the job. They carry with them their poor process and structure or lack thereof.

Products and databases should be well linked and not replicated. Also, I don't understand why we are paying money for information we already have in our database. Stop partnering with data vendors with sub-par quality data. Just read the enhancement requests and you can hear the clients screaming at the quality of our products and lack of data integrity.

At the route development and engineering is going, small companies with better development process will eventually take over. We can at least gather quality data since that is our future.

Pros

- working hours are getting better , the more senior one is
-free food & drinks
-nice office location
-growing company

Cons

-lack of too many job opportunities at FactSet in Frankfurt, as the team is not too big

Advice to Senior Management

take more of a leading role

Pros

Free lunch, great life / work balance, talented engineers, tech freedom, great benefits, good office location, good amount of leave

Cons

Base salaries start great but don't continue trend in depth of time - generally speaking Factset could be rewarding its key assets, its engineers, more accordingly with market standards.

Advice to Senior Management

Well managed company - keep it up!

Pros

Exposed to top-level decision makers on both the buy and sell side on a regular basis.
Young, vibrant culture.
Rapid advancement

Cons

Flat structure, so you hit a ceiling pretty fast, usually some sort of sales or product expert role.
No 401k matching

Advice to Senior Management

keep up the good work

Pros

Great corporate culture, which explains why they are on Fortune's Best Places to Work For List

Cons

If you're not interested in sales or product development, growth potential is challenging

Advice to Senior Management

Continue as is

Pros

It's a good, medium sized company to work at. Not so big that you don't have the chance to know everyone in your department (Engineering, Sales, Systems, etc), and not so small that everyone knows everything about everyone else.
Managers work their way up through engineering, so you can talk to someone 4 levels above you about detailed technical problems if you want.
If you work hard, you can get a good name and respect for yourself.

Cons

Most software engineering jobs involve some sort of on-call obligations. Usually it's not too bad, but some groups do get paid a lot.
The pay could be better.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay engineers more.
Come up with a sabbatical program to give employees a larger chunk of time off.
Start an office in a more fun city, like Denver. Not all of your employees are all that interested in the financial system. It would help retention to have more chances for growth outside of Norwalk.