Acumen reviews

While I mentioned I got to do a lot of things, I got lucky. Others are dreadfully bored from doing the same thing. It is a coin flip. Management is hit or miss. Some managers are great, others are not. This is usually because managers are just analysts that have been there long enough, typically. Workloads can be very volatile. Some weeks you are wondering how to fill 8 hours with work and others you are finding yourself wishing for sweet relief after 12+ hours. There is an incredible lack of communication between branches of the company that can lead to issues. This would not be as much of an issue if certain tasks did not take several parts of the company to do. Salaries are low if you look at it from a tech company perspective but high if you look at it from a public policy perspective. There is very high turnover. Sometimes this is because people go on to higher education. The end result is less overall experience.

The drawback of staffing a company with a lot of people who are fresh out of school is that there isn't a lot of outside work experience brought to the company. Most of the new employees have never known anything outside of the university, or a summer internship type experience. The result is that, while there is a lot of technical training, there isn't a lot of experience in working in a team environment towards a shared long-term goal (not typically learned in a university). Internal communication suffers as a consequence, which can result in unevenly distributed workloads, last-minute requests, duplication of work, version control problems, etc. The company is moving in the direction of being more mature and "integrated", but there is some distance to go. Pay and benefits are adequate for the location and typical experience level. But you don't go into public policy to get rich. Work-life balance is a function of the distribution of workload. If you're in the weeds having to fix old mistakes, it will be bad. But if things are going well, it's fine.