- All the below considered, I think the fact that aside from being offended when I put in my initial (very long out) notice, no one in my management line ever reached out after that to see what was up. Not only that, but even though I put in a long notice to give them time and to finish up projects before leaving, I was treated as if I was unreliable after that. Only employees that I had gotten to know personally acknowledged I was leaving and wished me well. Odd since just before I put in notice I was commended for amazing work and was on track to taking a major project.
- Unlimited PTO is a joke if there is work. Due to too few hours on projects causing a large workload, it's hard to take or get time off. Many employees here work on PTO and that’s unacceptable to me.
- In PCI consulting you usually work alone. Coalfire touts a team atmosphere and on big projects you get someone to help so you can get time off if needed. I found this just to be a way to assign people with few hours to your project, creating more unbillable work for you to divide out work that they may or may not do. Sending 2 consultants on-site to the client just wasted double the hours, cost the client more, and had little to no upside.
- Project managers. This is touted as a huge benefit that I found to be a huge pain. In theory the project managers help by taking away the client relations that take time and keep projects on task. I found this to be wildly inconsistent and often created more work for me. Clients would contact PMs who never responded then contact me upset weeks later looking for a response. Mostly PMs just seem to create unneeded meetings to fill your calendar with time wasters. I worked with many PM and only one had the balance between too little communication and too much.
- Too many people with access to your schedule and competing for your time. With project managers, resource managers, team managers, directors, and VPs all trying to work with you on a personal level, your calendar fills up with meetings that have nothing to do with your consultant work, leaving you in a constant behind state.
- The need to keep your calendar up to date. I was hired under the guise of managing myself and my hours as I see fit as long as my work got done. In realty all of the above people will just look at your calendar and schedule meetings without asking form anywhere between 8 am and 6 pm. You find yourself having to put after work activities on your calendar to stay out of waste of time meetings because many people won’t check time zones.
- Remote doesn’t really mean remote here. I was hired as a remote employee attached to an office hundreds of miles away. I was constantly being asked to come work in the office for a week when I wasn’t traveling for a client. That just meant I stayed at a hotel, come into the office every day, tried to find an empty desk, and worked from my small laptop screen all day (killing my productivity), while the local team came and went as needed according to their social calendar, or just worked remotely altogether. More than once I came to work in the office for a week by management request just to leave and work at the hotel (to utilize the hotel TV as a monitor) because no one else was there.
- Farmed out for local visits. In the interview process I was very up-front that I was not interested in constantly working in my local large city due to traffic. Shortly after hire I was asked to do a local visit and said yes. From that point on my calendar was filled with local visits when I wasn’t traveling for a client. No one cared that for a 2 hours assignment I was traveling round trip 8 hours due to traffic. You can imagine the affect this has when my workload is already too much.
- Constant need for on location team meetings and “highly encouraged” after hours activities. Thy would schedule a team meeting and it was mandatory unless a client threw a fit. Management didn’t care how much work you had to do. So already drowning in work you’d travel for the meeting or training to be in the office all day and then basically be told you better be at the after-work activity. I’d have to go home on the weekend after these trips and tell my family I have to work all weekend to make it up.
- Poor work quality in auditing aspects. I should probably just leave it there.
- Bashing the competition. I found Coalfire to be a very cultish environment. They tout themselves as the best and having no competition and are constantly pushing swag. I found that a lot of my co-workers came up as associates at Coalfire and had never consulted somewhere else so they had no idea how some of the practices were poor or how uncommon the workload is. I think the poor work quality was a major result of having so many senior consultants come from being promoted from associates and having no outside experience.
- Time cards. Every week management has to send out multiple reminders to a company full of adults to do ensure the task gets done. Time cards take forever to do because they use an older system that doesn’t show the hours you have left on a project, so you have to take multiple screenshots of other windows in the same application and plan what you’ll charge before you go to actually put your time in.
- Hours for projects. I think this is related to the poor quality, or maybe even a result. For PCI consulting, Coalfire is giving about half the hours per project compared to some competitors. In most cases management knows this and expects you to do the rest of the work on your own time (not counting as billable for bonus).
- No collaboration. In all other companies I’ve worked for consultants are encouraged to discuss client strategies and unique situations to help each other. The few times I reached out, not only did I not get any answers or advice, but I was made to feel like I was bothering everyone. One time I was asked quite rudely why my client was doing this…IDK, but it is what it is, why are you getting angry with me?
- The overall project assignment and inability for the consultant to manage the flow made every project hectic when it could be avoided. In most places the consultant runs the show. At Coalfire you’re another cog in the wheel with little power to change it.
- All of these cons combined made my experience hell because I won’t miss client deadlines or compromise my work quality. To keep up with the above I was working an average of 10 hour days when I was home and 14-16 when I was on the road. It was too the point that I was annoyed with clients who didn’t want a working lunch because I needed to leave earlier to work another clients report. If not for being able to work non-stop when traveling away from the family, I would have never met many of my deadlines. My family regretted me taking this position more than I did.
- There are other major reasons I left out, but that would be too in the weeds and reveal what is probably considered proprietary information.