Strong Aspirational Values, Difficult Lived Experience
Pros
Work-life balance and benefits are reasonably good. Underlying company values are strong, albeit more aspirational than practiced. People are generally helpful and approachable, and sometimes empathetic. PitchBook generally hires good people. When it get things right, it really nails giving people the opportunity to shine and grow in a way that suits their goals. It has a strong learning and enablement team. Its people and culture teams are valuable assets to the business, earnestly working to ensure quality of life at the company. However, downward pressure during economic headwinds seems to make everyone throw up their hands and all bets are off, culture-wise (see my "cons" notes here for more detail).
Cons
Revenue in recent years has been tough, and office to office, manager to manager, there seems to be a prevailing culture of shifting blame rather than accepting responsibility, that often reads to me and my peers as gaslighting. My impression is that this behavior is modeled, with individuals shifting blame in order to protect their own curated image of self. While common in many corporate workplaces, the practice is taken to an extreme here. Overall, the offices seem to be "bro-y" too, which isn't uncommon for fintech, and isn't uncommon in a revenue-forward office either, but that said, there is an unspoken expectation to assimilate into that culture in spite of there being written policies and values welcoming everyone. It's not hostile per se in this sense, but it does very much create an in-group/out-group dynamic. Both of these aspects of the practiced culture (rather than the stated culture) leads to an abundance of really annoying things like: being one upped in meetings when there's no cause for it, people trying to discount other's contributions in a public forum - reading more as insecurity for the person doing the putting down rather than the person making the first comment, some gaslighting from mid-management; they shift the blame to their reports, often changing the facts or curating a narrative that doesn't actually exist, etc. Many at the company have been there a while, which seems to have created an atmosphere where people are reluctant to consider different approaches or ways of doing things. Although there is a specific (and admittedly noble) commitment to embracing and driving change, that is rarely lived in the mid-management and IC levels of the organization. This also fosters more broadly a company culture where people seem to care more about how they are perceived than actually achieving results. To be fair, that's not a quality unique to PitchBook by any measure, and you'll find it in most workplaces. Still, based on my observation, this sort of office politics is really next level compared to what I've experienced in the past. In spite of all this, PitchBook is staffed by generally good people, but my lived experience there suggests that 1) management is out of its depth in a poor revenue environment leading to 2) poor modeled behavior that is perniciously impacting the workplace culture and 3) seriously waters down the aspirations of the stated company values when compared to the real-life experience.
