Flawed business model, unrealistic expectations, disorganized management
Pros
- The salary seemed decent at first for a Research Associate I position, but if you consider the cost of living and the difficulty of getting a raise then it isn’t so great - The benefits are excellent because you get an additional 15% of your salary contributed to retirement by the company, so your true salary is 15% higher - Most people are very educated and easy to get along with - Few meetings - The office was nice, I had a large private office with a large window - Free and easy parking at the Los Alamitos office
Cons
- Salary, benefits, everything is funded by grants and contracts so there is strict timekeeping. All work must be productive and billed to a project in 15-minute increments, and it can be challenging to keep track of which projects and how much time to bill each one. Certain projects have strict budgets, and you will need to keep track of how many hours you can bill so you do not go over budget. If you go to a coworkers’ office to have a chat for 5 minutes, that is time that you can’t count as part of your 40 hour workweek, because all work must be productive and billable to a client. It did not feel like being a full-time salaried employee but rather being an hourly employee working multiple unrelated part-time jobs as a contractor in your own company. People are treated as expendable human resources and may be thrown onto projects that may not fully utilize their skills or interests because they need to make sure that employees have enough hours to bill each week. As you get promoted you become more “expensive” to the client and you will have less time to complete the same tasks so your job will be more stressful. Some coworkers told me they did not want to be promoted because of this. - I was constantly reminded by management of all the negatives of working in the “soft money world”. Because of the soft money business model, they use a matrix organizational structure where you report to multiple managers at the same time and often work on 4-6 projects at one time. However, you are also expected take the lead on each project you are assigned to and do tasks that the manager does not explicitly tell you to do, in order to meet their high expectations. This was unrealistic because working on so many projects at a single time makes it difficult to focus on doing any one thing very well, and often you are put on the project long after it has started so you aren’t knowledgeable about that project. I would often be interrupted by one of my managers every 2-3 days and asked to work on a task that was completely unrelated to what I was currently doing. Because people work on so many projects at once and almost never see projects from beginning to end, they don’t specialize in anything which makes them more expendable. - The goal is to do what the client wants, make them happy so they keep funding projects, and fundraise to keep your job, but producing high quality or innovative research is secondary. There is a constant bootlicking of clients and I believe this is because they are so worried about making sure that there aren’t any reasons for clients to pull their funding. I was reprimanded one time for sending an email to a client that sounded like I was asking them to do something for me, even though the client seemed happy to do it. - Advancement as a researcher is completely tied to securing funding from grants and contracts. If you don't have the ability to secure external funding for research, you will not move up as a researcher. However, there is little opportunity to develop this skill for entry to mid-level researchers because you will be working on specific parts of other people's proposals, not leading your own. I saw highly skilled people who had been working in the same position rank for 10+ years and it was because they weren’t involved in securing external funding. There is an unspoken expectation that you will need to put in more than 40 hours a week to work on fundraising but that isn’t productive or billable work. - Some of the managers were very disorganized and didn’t have the skills to be good managers. It could take weeks for them to reply to an email. Some managers were promoted into management positions because they were highly skilled as researchers, programmers, etc. but that doesn’t translate to being a good manager. Managers were often clueless of the other projects I was working on. - The performance evaluation process is flawed and inconsistent. Expectations are not clearly set at the beginning of the year. You set goals to achieve but are not evaluated based on whether you achieve those goals. You are asked to write up a self-evaluation and submit it to your manager, but different managers already have their own opinions and never ask you give feedback about their performance, which made me feel like they did not care if they were being poor managers.
