The firm is trying to get by on its reputation as a nice place to work which is based on when it was a much smaller firm. Quite frankly, that is getting stale. The firm has growing pains, caused by weak middle managers and supervisors. Neither upper management nor HR will change anything, so it is either follow along or get out. The culture’s nice but you can get the same culture elsewhere without the backstabbing and melodrama. A “Have” vs. “Have Not” clique mentality is growing. HR also spends a great deal of time getting on those “Best Places to Work” list. If you have to ask your employees to vote for the best place to work you probably aren’t one of those places.
The firm is famous for its conference rooms named for guitars or guitar legends. Whoopee. It is work; do you real need to have your coolness bona fide? If so, buy yourself a pair of righteous shades and wear your baseball cap backwards.
You will learn a lot at Hamilton Lane, but one of the problems is getting pigeon-holed where you do not want to be or getting caught up in growing jealousy between departments. On the fund investment team, you will work long hours, which is standard in this type of job, but is not standard for other departments at the firm. Client service and BD are where you want to be to get really noticed. The IT team plods along, probably because the staff of developers is constantly in flux while the Director of IT is reading everyone’s emails and watching the surveillance cameras. Other than that, everything is fine.
