Instrument reviews

– Reviews are held with the principal partners, who only communicate with you during your review. Feedback is vague without context and rarely actionable. – Company culture is centered around cliques and alcohol. – Employees are encouraged to date one another.

A real lack of self-awareness around what is an appropriate way to care for employees, or even what is possible within a for-profit corporation. There is a lot of rhetoric around caring for employees through superficial amenities, like a free Headspace account, but in shepherding someone's career they fail spectacularly. They seem to lack any self-awareness around how the drive for maximum profitability limits their ability to be meaningful caretakers of their employees in a personal sense, and frequently they blur the lines around what an appropriate amount of care is or should be. The cult-y vibes that endear you to your employer are leveraged against you when it comes to salary and promotion negotiations if you aren't in the "in crowd". It is generally mystifying how they determine who gets rewarded and how, despite new metrics rolled out nearly every year, with the one constant being the caveat, "at our discretion" allowing them to reward whomever maintains their status quo and rendering everything moot in the end anyway. They have had a lot of cultural issues over the years and always profess a commitment to do better, but in rolling out new standards and processes, C-level executives are never held to those standards, keeping the fundamental problems in place. It is a very fixed environment that claims to be flexible, and you can end up wasting a lot of time there if you don't catch on to it fast enough.