Pros
- Truly flexible work hours (you must bill 80 client hours every two weeks – when and where you do it is effectively optional). - Enormous independence and intellectual responsibility for solid hires. I have gone days without being micromanaged. - High quality office buildings in principal locations. Santa Monica office is an architectural marvel. - Strong name recognition in nearly every other white collar field. For some lines of work a multiyear stint is as good as an Ivy League degree. - Pay comparable to big box consultancies such as Accenture, Booz Allen, and Deloitte for similar experience (although not by way of educational credentials or quality of work demanded). The perks of a non-profit without the poverty. - Six weeks of unrestricted, paid leave per year, in addition to standard holidays (see caveat below). - Very minimal but classy travel (Ritz Carlton / business class upgrades).
Cons
- RAND has an internal labor market where one must bid onto projects based on semi-formal networking. This works fine so long as there are more man-hours of work to be done than man-hours available, but when things get lean it can get somewhat troublesome. Taking unexpected vacation days to fill in gaps in coverage is only made palatable by how much leave is given. - There is little to no workforce planning beyond minimally useful end of fiscal year targets. Therefore, severe imbalances in workflow can occur within a given practice area, resulting to serious lulls in one’s ability to bill clients. For example, several principal investigators are having a deliverables reviewed at once to meet a DOD mandated submission deadline, and therefore cannot be bothered to issue new tasks to mid-level employees. - Little room for intellectual movement. There are effectively three major lines of consulting work at RAND: traditional defense-industrial issues for the Pentagon (where RAND made its name), intelligence work which amounts to very high level augmentation for the CIA, NSA, etc., and health / labor / population issues. To the extent people move between these areas, it is only because say, the Army requests a medical study and it requires specific bureaucratic knowledge to come to fruition. The remainder of RAND research – in areas like infrastructure, the arts, development, policing, etc. – is very piecemeal and represents very low dollar flow. - There is no mechanism to fire underperformers / nasty personalities that lack a fixed term contract. There are a handful of senior researchers in every office that are atrocious, but continue to cobble together enough coverage to meet their billable targets and hence hang on.