There is no Cost of Living bump for employees living in different parts of the country, so Bay Area employees are getting the dirty end of the stick in terms of purchasing power compared to their counterparts in, say, Arizona. This definitely won't change anytime soon.
Being a consultant is not a convenient career. Weekends at work can happen, and once you are identified as someone who is willing to work on a weekend then be prepared to get called in frequently. Client-imposed deadlines are occasionally insane and some project managers promise more than they can deliver within a reasonable time frame.
Generally people are very good to work with, and very smart, and very thorough, and focused on quality. However, insane deadlines and workloads that Exponent gets from certain clients has caused quality and technical merit to start slipping. That is something that would never be accepted in the early days of "Failure Analysis Associates" but as Exponent is a public company, make NO mistake, they are all about the bottom line. Expect management to cost cut as much as possible, and expect that bringing in quantity of work is more important to the bottom line than quality or technical accuracy of the work product.
Each work product is reviewed before sending to clients (this is a good thing) but there huge differences in the quality of the reviewing skills of various people. In some cases the review system is a major roadblock to getting good work product out the door to clients who are dying to get a report in their hands. In other cases the review system is rushed to get a report out as quickly as possible. In all cases the review system makes accurate budgeting difficult for anyone who is acting as a project manager, and adds considerable expense to the clients...resulting in the burden for overbudget projects sometimes landing on junior staff who unluckily got saddled with a "project manager" role.
If upper management doesn't know you or doesn't like you for some reason, advancement can be very difficult. Some Principals seem to be the favorites of upper management while some people stay as Senior Manager for a long time just barely below the Principal level.
