Pros
Colleagues and peers at the individual contributor level are incredible, inspiring, intelligent, and humble. The majority of the people at PA are super kind, well meaning and work hard. There is a lot of people who are overqualified and eager to grow and expand their skills. My colleagues were critical in my journey towards self improvement.
Cons
1. The favoritism is real. It is almost laughable how differently people are treated from individual to individual. If you are well liked by a handful of people who I would say operate as tyrants, then you are good to go. If those couple of people don’t like you for whatever arbitrary reason they’ve chosen, you are not going to grow or be treated as someone of value. It is really wrong to play with people’s careers like that. 2. The micromanagement is debilitating at times. We are all professionals, so to treat people like children and micromanage every aspect of their life is not the right strategy to achieve a happy workforce. Everyone is responsible enough to work unsupervised and freely, without feeling like there is always someone hovering over them questioning every decision. 3. Pay is actually not on par with the market at all. A Senior Analyst goes for about $100K minimum but PA wants to continue to pay low wages. In fact, they are so unwilling to pay people what they’re worth that they’ve prioritized staffing the offshore office in India, instead of investing in resources for the US side of the business. 4. Shady/underhanded stuff is going on in the background constantly. People who refer employees don’t get their referral bonuses, others have their bonuses cut based on absolutely zero factual evidence. Everyone who is an upper level manager or above is incredibly willing to look the other way when sketchy things are going on because they don’t want to be the ones on the chopping block. 5. You will have to do two peoples jobs for the price of one because the company is so understaffed, unable to retain talent, and incapable of placing itself in an attractive enough light to attract new talent. 6. They will sell you dreams during your interview. Don’t fall for it. They say things like, we promote from within, but that is not the case. The company heavily relies on outside hires, despite having a vast pool of internal talent willing and able to move up in the company. 7. You can do so much better. I know you can. The dollars you’ll make here are not worth the emotional turmoil of dealing with these people, I promise.