Pros
Summer hours, out-performing is easy, limited hours each week, work life balance, nice every-day perks. Our company has always been a gem in the investment industry for its limited hours and relaxed environment which are still consistently present at the company. Expect to work less than 45 hour weeks typically and enjoy the free soft drinks, tea and coffee (and bagels on Wednesdays). I think generally speaking, our managers mean well and do care about their employee's wellness.
Cons
Compensation packages, limited upward mobility, strategy inconsistency, regular corporate missteps, increasingly opaque. Over time, Morningstar is losing touch with its employee base. Many coworkers sit with hardly anything to do, and yet our headcount is exploding YoY. Projects regularly stall without adequate developers (or developers that are required to actually work at work) and during vacation season, people lose all sense of delivering what's necessary to our clients in a timely fashion. Simmering resent is perhaps as widespread as it's ever been during my tenure with the company - at face value everybody is happy, but when you talk to anybody over details, people are truly miserable. Limited hours sounds great, but this slack in employee time results in employees feeling underutilized and underappreciated. Add to this substantially sub-par pay packages and our hard working, innovative and bright employees are the ones leaving the firm. Often the long-term employees here are either high ranking and loaded with stock (very smart as well) or they're manipulators of the system who feel free to take 4-6 weeks of vacation a year and move slowly at best when they're on the job. A note for the ambitious, you will be utterly disappointed here. A specific note for future MDPs (Morningstar Development Program candidates), expect no negotiation salaries, dictated position changes, no pay increases with promotions, and annual raises that trail inflation.