Pros
Some colleagues are incredibly nice, smart, and driven.
Cons
- Work life balance is awful. The higher ups are obsessed with billing at all costs, even at the expense of family life. Work on nights and weekends is very common, if not expected. Most people in the company have terrible work life balance. - The best people seem to leave after a few years. Unfortunately, that means the ones remaining who make it to the top are not the best people you want leading the company. - Senior management acts like everyone can make it to the top and nobody leaves. Instead, there's an obvious high attrition rate and very very few people make it to the top level. But unlike other consulting companies that embrace the "up or out" theory, Exponent seems to pretend that attrition doesn't exist. - Senior management tends to be good at one thing: billing. They have very little actual management skills and are terrible at growing the "lower level" employees' careers. - The company seems to be obsessed with short term returns. They don't care about long term growth of people or the company, only quarter by quarter. This is a really bad long term strategy. - Lots of market credit stealing and taking advantage of young, fresh PhD grads. Unfair system for reward. - The obsession with billing means you will do anything to bill more, even if the tasks are really simple and low level. This means all the technical skills people have developed in their PhDs just erode over time. This is REALLY bad for your long term career.