Charles River Analytics reviews

No real products. Profit comes from the SBIR program. The program was almost shut down this year. There was no real communicated strategy for dealing with the main source of funding of the company going away. When teams win proposals everyone above you gets a cut for their paycheck so it is sort of a pyramid. People who profit from the company structure have been with the company for 20+ years, so you’re essentially working for their retirement account. Your effort becomes their vested share price. You’re expected to write proposals while your boss gets the credit as PI. So you do all the internal work, reports, managing, scheduling, final reports and demos, and your boss gets the external credit for their CV. Turnover is a big problem since they mandated a 3 day in the office 2 day at home hybrid schedule. Employees were not engaged in the process at all. We’ve lost whole capabilities like NLP and cybersecurity.

Management at the company is conservative about change. The company’s roots are in SBIr projects and funding, which continues to this day. Despite desire to grow beyond SBIR projects the company lacks the infrastructure and experience needed to prime large contracts. Staff, particularly scientists, are expected to be one man/woman shows who master business development, proposal writing, project management, subcontractor management, in additition to being masters/experts of their primary area of interest. Although the company pays lip service to base salary and annual bonuses being merit based the reality is that raises, bonuses, and promotions are much more intricately linked to proposal writing and contracts brought into the company than merit/quality of technical work.