Pros
- Diverse and highly qualified colleagues, many of whom holding master's degree at relatively low levels. Given the nature of the work, mid to low-level employees are also diverse, having come from different countries. - Solid research team with easy knowledge transfer. Most people are willing to share information and help each other out, especially during busy periods where we were left to on our own despite our feedback of understaffing. - Once in a while there are interesting projects from either niche sectors or project types. These helped a researcher to be more creative in problem solving, but then again they must do it on their own because no resources, mentorship or training for these nonstandard works was provided.
Cons
- No investment in employee's professional development. For the Business Intelligence practice, research and writing are pretty much the only hard skills you have as a researcher. They might argue OSINT skills, but it's largely basic surface web research and is not transferrable to actual OSINT roles. - Fixation on billable man-hours, narrowly defined as any work tagged to a project. 1) The high KPI on this makes it virtually impossible for a junior employee to spend time on personal development, though there's not much resource on that, either. 2) There are non-billable hours that are still essential to winning billable projects, such as proposal writing and scoping; however, it is perplexing that the management has decided that these are not part of productive hours. As a result, sloppy proposals, underestimation of project price and tight timeline are common, and the directors would leave it to the project team to deliver anyway. - Stagnant if not declining industry, with declining pool of clients and project value. As such, the most common way companies gain advantage is to undercut price or promise faster turnover. There's a limit to how fast the project team could realistically complete a project without either sacrificing quality or work overtime every single time. Any feedback on this has fallen on deaf ears. - Fixation on revenue means little to no effort on employee welfare to retain them. Systemic issue such as described above is the source of dissatisfaction, brain drain and poor morale, and this couldn't be offset by random wellness sessions instigated by HR. - No transparency from leadership, even on the most basic things like tracking our own monthly KPIs. Salary discussion is actively discouraged. No, it is a good practice to minimise information asymmetry and ensure fair pay and to prohibit that just worsens your reputation. - Compensate your employees accordingly. So many are offered bottom of the pay range despite their track record showing otherwise. Company is only willing to bump up compensation when they're threatening to leave. This shows you have the budget all along, but aren't willing to reward them if they had stayed. Why is that? Also, bonus is really low. - No clear career progression, which has been largely based on tenure. I'm beating the dead horse here, but I still think it's necessary to say that having mostly Caucasian leadership regardless of the office location (even Asia) despite having locals as the majority of mid- to junior-level employees indicates a lack of willingness to localise the practice at the very least. As I have said, there are so many highly, and even over-, qualified people at the lower levels.
