Focus on the share price. Poor culture.
Pros
It's easy to get a good amount of deal experience. Lot of young colleagues, so you will make friends for life! Strong reputation in Switzerland. Theoretical chance to relocate to other offices, but it depends what team you're in and if there is a demand elsewhere. I'd say this is one of the pros for the operations teams where employees can go to Asia for a few months or years. Pay is ok, but don't expect a top salary. Still ok though if you do a good job and your line managers like you. Nice corporate parties and events overall. The associate program is pretty good for those who want to work with investments but are unsure of where to go. It's annoying that you get paid in shares that are locked in, but the share price has been steadily going up.
Cons
Rather bad office culture: PG relies a lot on management of fear. Going to work everyday means fearing to be penalized, yelled at and treated like crap. I don't know about any other serious investment firm with such a high employee turnover rate (sub-VP, because from VP onwards you are too locked in), and a lot of that is due to this. Apparently, this is much worse in the Zug office where the work/life balance is zero and the rules even stricter! The firm's primary focus is to maximize the share price (c 50% of the shares held by employees; c 25-30% by the founders), which is done by focusing 100% on fundraising. If you're in an investment team, you will work more hours for same or less pay vs the fundraising teams, and face an investment committee that most of the time has no experience from making a direct investment (at least not within your field). PG is not known to be the best investor in the industry, which the management seems to be fine with. Very bureaucratic. The back- and middle-offices are huge and keep implementing new procedures and processes all the time, and the firm culture stipulates that you know all of these by heart. It's very cumbersome to get things done unfortunately. You probably need to be in the Zug office if you want to make sure to have a decent career in the firm. And you don't want to be in the Zug office more than a few days per year. Extremely hierarchical with a lot of steps before partner level. Every department has two co-heads plus two co-heads per sub-team and probably a few heads and co-heads below them. If you're not a co-head of something, you will be seen as a nobody. Let's put it this way, I would not like to be a woman in that firm. As one can see, there are exceptionally few women in leading positions, even for a firm in the finance industry.
