FactSet Reviews

Former Employee – worked at FactSet full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – High responsibility, good learning experiences, autonomy.

Cons – Ability to maintain continuous challenges through role changes or promotions. Some large company bureaucracy.

Advice to Senior Management – Align goals in all cross-functional areas of development, design, database, etc.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at FactSet full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Great work/life balance. Office clears out at 530. Company tends to hire people out of college (pro if you're out of college). Lots of heavy drinking with peers. Do not have to work hard/ stay late/ think outside of the box. Compensation is very tight, and recognition does not sync with intellectual capital, or contribution. Will look great on a resume for a few years of experience, or while you find another role with a client. After you've been there for a bit, many come in late, lie about appointments in calendar, or work from home. If you can get through the interview process, and seem to fit in with the culture, very easy to make a few key contacts, pretend you are an asset, and never have to really work. Especially when you can choose the people who peer review you.

Cons – Two main downfalls I see.
1) Very cliquey, non-flat/communicative, to the point of hurting business.
2) The Peter Principle, people are promoted to their level of incompetence.

Managers largely are promoted who were decent at their old role, and with the company the longest. Since the company grew rapidly over the past, you see this many places. Leaving managers who can't really manage, think, or inspire. A huge determent to the employees below them, and company as a whole. To secure (or justify) their job, they create processes that are not the most efficient, and they are basically there to just barely manage personal relationships. At the worst, they are not recognizing the talent below them. This exacerbates the non communicative problem. This has gone on for so long because of the practice of hiring people out of school, no one questions. All of the best talent is hired away, left with the worst and least motivated.

Advice to Senior Management – Ironic here. I think the advice to management, would be to actually listen to advice, from your company at all levels.

When a consultant suggests (through the appropriate channels) to build an app, it sets a tone (to all the middle managers) when the upper manager of the company replies harshly that this would never be done because there was no value in doing this, alluding to all the points that the junior person failed to see. These types of actions perpetuate the growing pains for the company. Even if this idea was later adopted, and the request/exchange expunged from the database, people become paralyzed from promoting good ideas. You are left with yes men, and a company that is much like a barbell portfolio. (Not much in the middle, lots of older execs (with a flawed vision), and younger college grads (incapable of really executing))

Stop hiring everyone (especially engineers) immediately out of college. A strength of the company has been it's service, and the caliber of the people, however as the company has grown, people have been promoted and have become career managers and have lost touch with the product.

I believe all, or most of the upper management has only worked at this company. They need to seriously shake stuff up. There is no real plan (another writer quotes 'the next double' which is illustrative). The company has atrophied from it's historic key strengths. Hard for some to see the forest through the trees. The perspective is lost because there is none.

My real aggressive advice to management would be to try to take the company private, do an overhaul cleaning of the structure/mgmt, make things flatter, promote good ideas and give employees credit for ideas and room to act on them, foster more communication, evaluate the serious opportunities and threats in the industry, buy an OMS or some way of becoming fully turnkey, and take on BBERG and all other competitors. ....Or just rest easy knowing you can retire easily, by not really having to change much, regardless of the outcome of the company.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at FactSet full-time

Pros – very good work life balance; nice coworkers; no pushing; soft deadline; free lunch

Cons – why we don't have free lunch at Friday :P

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at FactSet full-time

Pros – Good work life balance.
Can learn a bit of development as long as you are a "yes" man.

Cons – bad career choice if you intend to "learn" anything in finance.
Extremely low pay especially if they sense that you need a visa.
Not a value addition to your resume in terms of brand name.
This is a software company that thinks that it can solve finance problems by writing code. The attitude percolates through the management ranks.
If you are an independent thinker, you cant progress here as they want people who say "yes".
No culture of modeling,research and no tradition of hiring smart people who can bring outside perspectives.
They misrepresent the nature of work as Financial engineering when all you will be doing is to write code and debug legacy code.It is actually financial development and a very poor development experience too at that.

Advice to Senior Management – If you want to grow, bring a tradition of innovation and hire people who bring research acumen and originality.

There is a tremendous "Old boys club" culture that is dangerous to any organization.

There is absolute lack of transparency when it comes to career progression.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at FactSet full-time

Pros – Great first job - exposure to broad range of financial data and client types.
Fantastic people and very young culture.

Cons – The work can get monotonous over time and the position can feel somewhat pigeon-holing in terms of your long-term career.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at FactSet full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Interesting work, free lunch, nice offices with strong employees

Cons – Extremely slow in improving the product. They moved my group over seas and were extremely disinterested in improvements before the move. Seemed like they knew it was coming for years but wanted to have people quit.

Advice to Senior Management – Get out of the research group.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at FactSet full-time for less than a year

Pros – Free food and lunch reimbursement
Perfect work-life balance for example you will get mentor when you are on boarding.
Personal space is wide and enough.

Cons – The projects are not that cool, not using much popular open-source technologies.
The bonus is not that much

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at FactSet full-time

Pros – Cutting edge tech compared to many other companies. Everyone in the company knows technology and development.

Cons – No diversity. No welcome for can pickup people, who have worked on the same set of technology can join no chance for join in pick it up. All started their career at factset and they grows up the ladder, thus almost imposible for some one to join while they are in mid level of their career. Factset does not understand capabilities or can pick it up.

Advice to Senior Management – Very closed, can open up. When interviewing not all should evaluate all skills.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at FactSet full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – (1) Good view from window.
(2) Work is interesting.
(3) Internal IT staff is excellent.
(4) OK place for a recent grad to get started.

Cons – (1) Training classes (of mostly kids out of college) promotes a very cliquey environment. If you were not on a track that went through this training, you felt left out.
(2) Seems like more than half of ones time was preparing for meetings, attending meetings and scheduling follow up meetings. Meetings are such a part of the culture that there is much attention given to 'Facilitators' whose job it is to keep the meetings moving. It's great that they're there, but scary that they're needed.
(3) Annual reviews use a '360 Review Process' . It's great that the opinions of one's peers are included, but it seems to be at the expense of one's accomplishments. Peers are invariably biased; too often petty differences are aired. There is SO much pressure not to rock the boat.

Advice to Senior Management – Hire some senior management from outside the company. There are layers and layers of middle management that should be cleared out but the existing home-grown executives seem reluctant to clean house.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at FactSet full-time for more than a year

Pros – For the most part great people. Some very very technically talented, experienced, smart people. They take care of their employees (excellent health care package, free lunch, stocked pantries, excellent work-life balance).

Cons – Promotions are based on tenure, rather than expertise, guts & glory, or accomplishments.
It's a big company and with that comes a lot of red tape and bureaucracy, making changes, even with the best of intent, is a challenge. Projects become stale over time, and the diversity of work can be limited (though this varies drastically by the team that you are in).

Advice to Senior Management – Give your rising stars the opportunities to do just that: rise.
Allow employees to move around teams more easily.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend