Pros
Competitive salary. Fantastic work space and office amenities. Opportunity to work on interesting problems and analytical assignments. Despite the overwhelming negatives of the company in Chicago, they do have one really smart people who work there. There is one fellow in particular within management who impressed me and sought to diversity what they were doing. He was also the only one to be skeptical of SAP/HANA as the anchor for marketing the product & service. What learned from him is it's not tools and technology in intelligence that counts the most; it's the human factor.
Cons
Highly dysfunctional management and work environment when I was there. Workplace harassment was tolerated or simply ignored. And turnover since then has been high on the Traveler program. Very good analysts are fired for reasons that have nothing to do with their work performance. Others just get fed up and leave. Promotion of inexperienced and unqualified young analysts right out of college into lead and management roles was a problem. It's great to seek young people for these roles but it seemed that upper management was obsessed with youth and did not give much though to the process of promotion. Just because someone excels and an analyst doesn't mean he or she will be a good boss. Also very few hires over 25. There is a bias against hiring older employees. From a work-life balance perspective the company is poor. If you are a 20-something employee living in Lakeview with room-mates that's fine. But if you have a home, family, kids and responsibilities outside of the office, it's not the place to be. They say they want to accommodate you, but you are looked down upon if you aren't the 20-something who lives at work from 7 am to 8 pm. From the work product side, Prescient Traveler product offering is not what it says it is. They say they use SAP/HANA do do data mining and analytics but this is not true. It's all done manually. Much of what they offer can be done by a much less expensive information technology and data analytic setup. They derive nothing from SAP/HANA in terms of machine intelligence....all insights are done manually. In fact I can do much of it from a laptop at home using web scraping of RSS feeds and simple Python scripts that run linguistic analysis; at orders of magnitude in terms of cost. About 80% of what they offer on the app can be done in this way. Also the lease on the Prudential flagship office is a huge albatross in terms of cost. They could have located in Itasca or Elk Grove Village for a lot less. The idea was to impress Fortune 50 prospects, but I imagine they have great views from their offices in New York already. How Traveler stays in business is a mystery to me except to say they were burning venture capital at an alarming rate when I left the company.
