Acumen reviews

Minimal investment in management quality/culture/support services to employees, combined with highly siloed teams, means that experiences can vary from excellent to terrible. Work-life balance and relationships among team members are frequent complaints. If any of the below describe you, Acumen may not be the place for you: (a) You're looking for a salary commensurate to other industries (tech/biotech/financial services) in the Bay Area. When I was hired at Acumen, starting salary was around $60-65k. If your goal is to make more like $100-120k and you're entry-level, then forget about Acumen and just pursue a role in a different industry. (b) you want a close, family-like feel from your workplace, where people tend to stick around long-term. Acumen is like the opposite of that. Retention is generally low, and people won't talk to you unless you take initiative to make friends. Even the layout of the Burlingame office reflects the anti-social environment (there are very few chairs out in the lobby for employees to gather, the offices are laid out in narrow hallways with cubicles, etc.). (I will say though that if you do take the initiative to make friends, you will make a lot of them, as there are a LOT of young-ish people in their 20s and 30s who are nice, have lots of fresh & fun interests, and are happy to hang out.) (c) you hope to rise in the ranks of the company to a point where you can chill and just make other people do the work. Actually, I observed that staff at Acumen work harder and harder as they rise in rank. (d) you need a positive, supportive, "everyone gets an A" type of work environment to be happy at work. Acumen's founders and current leadership are quite direct in their communication style and have been known to express critical feedback in very strong terms. Unfortunately, this sets a low standard for culture at the company that seeps into most teams. If you have fairly thick skin & aren't too bothered by a dearth of positive feedback, you'll be fine. But if you know yourself well enough to understand that you won't be happy unless you routinely receive positive feedback, chances are that you will be unhappy and the experience won't be worthwhile.

Personal growth or career development depends on your supervisor, upper management is a joke. -Work life balance is difficult to have, since Acumen primarily works on government contracts and those usually have low budget. As a result, they don’t have enough funding to hire more people, so each person is stretched a lot. -Leadership team is not dedicated to resolve the work life balance issue, as someone in the upper management team said that “people at senior level working 50 hours a week is normal“. That was not miscommunication, as that message was in a written form. -You get decent-good amount of PTO, but whether you can actually use it is another question. Someone from the leadership team used to ask a person to work on an "urgent project" while knowing that person would be on 2 days PTO after NOT having taken a break for 6 months. -Management intend to apply “quick fix” and does patches when issues occur, rather than trying to implement permanent/long run fix, especially when there are understaffed issues. -Your experience and growth depends on your team, well, mostly your direct supervisor. If you decided to join Acumen, pray that you’ll be assigned to a good team. -Starting salary is low. -Benefits package is not great (but decent, especially if this is your first job). -The H1B visa is cap-exempt nonprofit visa. Difficult to switch to for-profit companies once you are on this visa. But this helps Acumen to keep foreign workers to stay--if they provided for-profit/regular H1B visa the retention will be way worse. -HR doesn't advocate for you. They implement what the leadership team decides. They also claim that they put together a lot of useful resources, but they rarely advertise those to employees, so you have to delve in the intranet yourself.