Pros
On good days the work is very exciting or you have very little to do which can be chill. Crisis/Garda keep acquiring companies which is good? Benefits/perks keep increasing but only because they were bad before. These tiny companies they buy up somehow outpace Crisis offerings greatly on things like 401k match, so parent company has no choice but to maintain benefits for that division and extend an equal level to other employees. Most peer coworkers are cool. Definitely a demand for this service, and growing even in econ downturn.
Cons
- You don't really work for/with Crisis if you do stuff with clients (tech companies/offices/sites). Intel work is a joke to impress clients who truly could not care less. When they do care and send your analysis higher up, you get no recognition or feedback. - Luck of the draw: GSOC's vary SO MUCH with different client companies. One could be a mailroom with daily alarm clearing for cameras and such across the world, one could be essentially serving as an EP intel analyst, everyone's in office assistant, Access control specialist, IT call center, Incident Commander when stuff is actually going wrong, and so much more all simultaneously. - Client blame: The one thing that the sites have in common: GSOC gets blamed for just about everything that goes wrong, especially security related but even for things like Covid policy gaps, and Crisis' client managers/program directors (i.e. middle management) above you completely go along with it and throw their teams under the bus. They do this so they can pretend like they're adding value "managing" when they aren't. - Manager blame: In the same vein, Crisis managers bend over backwards to baby the clients. This happens daily. You are not allowed to discuss solutions with the client like a normal coworker or do anything less than treat them like a toddler. If a client manager contradicts their last ask or a policy/procedure which they wrote for a very specific reason, you will get in trouble for continuing to do things that way. This all happens with no notice; one day they randomly get annoyed with their own customized process. This does not happen on normal teams at normal companies. The manager would get called out and apologize to their reports. Then they can fix it together. - Pay: You are not going to be paid fairly for the value provided to clients. Very few sites are either not inundated by busywork or getting hit with more and more teams to support. Imagine you get the worst tasks from 10+ teams pawned off on you. And no official "experience" or skills to show for it career-wise. And you have to do all the normal GSOC tasks like monitoring developments and weather worldwide. - Career track: you essentially can only go to another client (sometimes they rotate you out anyways if you don't change with the wind of your client's wishes), move up to the aforementioned middle management positions, or get cross-trained to pick up other types shifts as a way to make more $$ (not really a sustainable life). - Lastly! This is not a normal modern company. Benefits are slim. Legally lowest possible sick time. Management structure is further stuck in the past. Especially for certain departments. Negotiations or normal HR sort of questions are handled so poorly and unprofessionally as a result. Truly demoralizing.