Pros
Home office is the de facto work arrangement. Despite multiple insinuations of the contrary, the company does not seem to be considering a return to office policy and residing in São Paulo is an empty requirement. There is a small home office additional pay. High-profile client exposition. In this position, you’ll be linked to high-profile global clients, and this can be a good selling point for your curriculum. Good equipment. Work laptop is a good machine and, despite refurbished materials, can deliver good work performance. Contact with international teams. In this position, you will be able to liaise and collaborate with international teams around the world. Your English will improve. Decent pay. Pay is OK for the position and is considered slightly above market average. No pressure for doing extra hours. Even in crazy high workload times, I personally did not experience any sort of pressure or demand for accepting extra work hours. Availability of extra hours pay was established and we were informed of the possibility, but, again, I personally did not experience pressures to take them. You will however be worked to the ground during normal working hours.
Cons
Excessive workload. The company is plagued by excessive workload pretty much year-round. Cases are delivered with extremely tight deadlines and it is not rare that you will pick up a case after its supposed due date. That is, you’ll be working on something that’s already late. Company keeps accepting urgent request even with skeleton staff. If you do accept a job offer here, be prepared to work in urgent matters almost all of the time. Lack of career progression and strategy. There is really no explicit effort by management to build and maintain career progression strategies. Performance reviews often feel arbitrary and are highly dependent on your TL. There is a somewhat clear path from Junior Analyst to Analyst, but it stops there and career progression rules are inescrutable or unavailable. Analysts, TLs and even General Managers are not privy to the decision process that takes place in upper management and you will most likely be left in the dark when it comes review and promotion cycle. Lackluster training and development. When you first join in, you’ll be submitted to a challenging two-week training program. That module is very thorough and will get you up to speed with the main work requirements. However, after those initial 14 days, all of the subsequent training will be up to you and you will be harshly judged during Quality Assurance, with frequent rework demands. There is no structured training and case review period for analysts and they are often left following the whims of specific QAers. Everything you do after the initial training is up to you. Considering the excessive workload and urgent rhythm, you will most likely not have enough time to train/read reviewed reports, so this is a big problem. Good analysts tend to remain good and bad analysts tend to remain bad since there is no structured effort to improve. This, matched with the mentioned excessive workload, means you’ll always be judged harshly on reports with impossible due dates to meet. Disregard of Brazil team. Working in the Brazil team, it is as if there is a big gap between us and the international management at large. International teams are often rewarded with end-of-year parties and seem to be privileged. Brazil team is supposed to provide cheap labor and nothing else. “Workplace culture” and other social integration policies were very short-lived and appeared and disappeared throughout the year. Be prepared to be treated as just cheap labor here. TLs promoted on technical basis. Team Leaders are often promoted based on their ability to provide fast and accurate Quality Assurance. This means that local management will be selected based on technical terms, and not on people skills. This results in a group of managers that are not really leaders and are not skilled with people, but rather with Quality Assurance and report appraisal. Good people leaders should have a mix between technical expertise and social skills; otherwise they’d be QAers only. Disconnected HR. HR for Brazil was at first nonexistent and then changed to a US-based team. HR is really not present at all and seems to only exist to get in the way. They schedule annual medical appointments at an awful place and will warn you hours in advance. Every issue HR has commanded was badly managed and at times unethical. Benefits. Benefits are below par. For December 2023/January 2024, meal allowance was simply forgotten and Brazil team spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve without meal and/or food allowance. There was no transparency by HR on the normal dates used for meal allowance deposit and it was common for the team to experience end of month anxiety regarding this. Health plan was awful, but was traded for a good one (Bradesco Saúde), albeit with no dependents. No further benefits were offered in terms of gym benefits, language courses, mental health help, etc. Use of incomplete technologies. The company will create and push new technologies for the analysts to use, but these new tools are more often than not incomplete and can present more problems than solutions. STATUS itself, the main platform used by the company, is plagued with problems and alterations outside of it are frequent, despite the many years of development. The company has been pushing AI-based text processing tools that are clearly not ready for use and can often increase time spent on a case rather than decrease it. Other non-AI tools are always presenting technical issues and errors. While analysts are swamped with cases and are constantly being overworked, mandatory use of incomplete or half-baked technical tools feels as insult added to injury. Isolating workplace. The full WFH arrangement can be comfortable, but once you’re set up with your normal routine, the day-to-day can be very isolating and solitary. If you’re a more extroverted type with desire to network/progress, this is certainly going to be a problem.