Good place to work for a couple of years
Pros
- Fairly laid back work environment (You work hard but it's pretty chill - shorts and sandals are the norm in the summer). - You are surrounded by very talented and driven professionals. They only accept top people from top universities so the connections you make are pretty great. - Qualtrics is growing really fast right now which means that there are more opportunities for early career growth than at most companies. - You will likely get opportunities to do projects that actually matter and make a difference for the company. - Free food / ability to bring your dog to work if that's your thing. - Definite emphasis on continuing education. Qualtrics University has licenses to Pluralsight and Code School that you can use. - Most managers really care about developing you and helping you move up in your career. (This isn't necessarily the case outside of Global Operations) - You'll make friends that you'll actually want to keep in touch with in 10+ years. - 3% match without the match (they just give you 3% into a 401K, no strings attached). - Pretty good insurance benefits for full time employees. - Stock options (vested over 4 years and only valid if you stay through an IPO or acquisition).
Cons
- Qualtrics University is a call center. You may be doing projects and working with people from top schools and household name companies, but at the end of the day you will be answering support phone calls and emails for a year before you can move into another position. - Salary for entry level positions outside of engineering are typically in the mid 30's with little to no room for negotiation. After hitting certain criteria which take about a year, you are able to get a ~$10k raise. - Qualtrics touts transparency, but there is little transparency into compensation or promotions. It's taboo to talk about comp at work. - The software products Qualtrics offers are surprisingly buggy. - Rather than pay off technical debt, Qualtrics loves to create new features and products so everything they build feels half finished. - If you get hired, that means you are way overqualified for the position that they are giving you and you will probably need to work for a year or more to get into a role more suited to your abilities. - Qualtrics won't help pay for grad school, MBAs or otherwise. - There is a definite air of elitism (Qualtrics upper management really thinks that Qualtrics is the best tech company in the world and look down on other tech companies). - The word meritocracy gets thrown around a lot, but tenure is a much better indicator of promotion then work preformed is. If you do your job, stay late once in while (making sure that your manager knows about it), toe the line, and don't ruffle too many feathers you should do pretty well.
