Pros
The people of ACA are what kept me for so long. It truly is a great group of professionals. Smart, good-natured with great senses of humor--just generally people you want to form meaningful relationships with. It is not the everyday people that are ACA's problem. Customer-focused Flexible schedules, flex time, and decent PTO. If you find something you're good at, there is opportunity to shift positions to play to your strengths after you've been there a while. A few good fringe benefits such as Summer Fridays and RRR week in July (one free week off, paid). Benefits are decent but would just call them "competitive" rather than "top of the line."
Cons
I hung on as long as I could before letting go. I really wanted to make it work, because when I started at ACA I used to love my job. ACA used to be a company who prioritized its employees. It did not cut corners, invested in employees' futures, and had a lot of forward momentum. Over the years, this has changed. When I left, I no longer recognized the company anymore. I understand that companies shift and change, but I (and many others it seems) do not care for the direction its heading. We went from being valued humans to numbers with faces. Making the decision to leave was hard, but also a no-brainer after my experiences during my tenure. The work distribution became abysmal. Near-constant overworking with no additional resources: people, pay, software, or otherwise. I will say that they did try several times to make delivery more sustainable, and perhaps they will get there one day, but the transition has been incredibly painful for many. Sales oversells and over-promises at the expense of delivery and operations. The pay is not competitive. People leaving often see huge pay bumps for similar positions (and often less grueling work). Salary bands are not public, so it is impossible to know how you compare to others on your team. They claim they did "market research," but produce nothing to back this up. The new performance review process was good in theory, but only in that it was better than what they had before. Promotion criteria still feels arbitrary, as do seniority levels and title progression. There is a clear "path to progression", but titles change with little to no shift in duties or responsibilities, especially at the junior level. I was there for half a decade and was still considered "junior". Favoritism is rampant in several teams. It was not hard to tell who was the favorite, based on the amount of opportunities they were given to succeed. You could be a fully successful team member who gave their all and then some, and still fall short if you weren't the favorite. Certain corporate teams actively seem to work in bad faith. There was a lot of gaslighting, blame-gaming, and intentional slights that made producing public-facing materials a nightmare. People are promoted to management positions who have no business being leaders. It is a reward for "good performance", but their leadership skills can create unhealthy team environments. Townhalls were very patronizing. Upper management touted "transparency", but often it just came off as corporate riffing/smoke-blowing. They would announce "great new benefits" for the team that ultimately did nothing to help us instead of fixing actual problems. For example: they now offer a 1-month-remote policy where workers can work and live wherever they want, away from home. Sounds good on paper, but so many of us were already remote to begin with, AND it could only be taken in 2-week or whole-month chunks. They announced it saying, "you can go work remote from Colorado for a whole month, skiing in your free time, living in the mountains with flexible schedules!" This does NOT entice lower-level employees, because who could afford such a thing? What if they have partners who cannot travel for that long? Children in school? It's a prime example of a benefit for show rather than a benefit with any practical use. The student loan forgiveness is capped at $10,000, and last I checked you have to be there for TEN YEARS to reap the full benefit of it. The month-to-month benefit was pretty paltry. I recognize this sounds like looking a gift horse in the mouth, but it leaves a sour taste when taken into consideration with everything else. Also another benefit for show to entice new hires. We would also ask questions during the townhall for clarification and more than once we were met with "just use common sense." Not helpful when you are not in a position to be making decisions. During COVID, they made pay cuts across the board (which was not uncommon), but they did not institute backpay even after exceeding PRE-COVID sales goals for the year. To boot, they made a skit about "deciding live whether they should/could re-instate our pay back to normal" on a townhall. No idea what that was about, but it was pretty insulting and tone deaf. You'll notice many of the good reviews are from people who have been with ACA for a short time. Just keep that in mind. Change is turbulent everywhere, but it is hard to be in a place where "change" is constant. Reorgs, product revamps, acquisitions, management changes. It wears on a person.
