Pros
Used to be a decent place for freshers to start, not anymore
Cons
A lot of the reviews are mandatory and guided and are part of a mandate to bury the negative reviews in 2nd/3rd/4th pages. Do yourself a favor and read all the reviews. IA being a start-up, you get some of the benefits of a start-up, good exposure to projects, on the delivery front line, etc. However, if you are an experienced DS/SDS/PL, you will soon realize that the problems are not unique, the work gets monotonous, the emphasis is more on patching things up instead of addressing the root cause. There are many points to make, very few of them are positive. The leadership does not inspire or give any confidence, and given the way they have been treating people, does not seem like they care about the long run. The company has always struggled in positioning itself as a product/services company. The way the engagement is kept active is through random ad-hocs that are proposed/generated by the "think tank" of the account, and most of the time, those instructions are vague at best, usually scribbled on a paper that needs at least 4 people to decipher. The CEO is surrounded by yes men/women who fan random ideas and suggestions that take up a lot of time. Instead of working on real problems, you will end up managing the expectations of the CEO and his followers. The PLs/DLs spend more time managing the CEO and his tantrums than handling the client. There are/were some good folks who stopped trying to voice their opinions because others "make sense" and agree to every word the CEO says. There are these town halls that are made to be a big deal, advocating transparency. Complete nonsense, the same information is repeated, so much so that people play townhall bingo waiting for those key phrases to be said. Work-life balance is non-existent and there is always this false sense of urgency created by “the followers” leading to nonsensical presentations that will show at least $30M in value add for the client. The team has been called out so many times by multiple clients on the value that was mentioned to grab their attention/start the project. A final bit on the rating- read all the reviews, there is a large portion of negative reviews, for a firm with less than 300 people, that is a lot. The problem is deep-rooted. Do yourself a favor and avoid this place. IA should not be your first choice in Data Science and Analytics. If you do decide to join, make sure you continue your learning via Udemy, Coursera, etc. because you are not going to learn true data science on the projects.
