Pros
Scenic location by the water in Burlingame. By commute standards it is quite out of the way, though. Recruiting staff are friendly and the recruiting process is not too hard Some nice, intelligent people as your co-workers or teammates. You can make friends here
Cons
Bad management, low pay, unpredictable work flow, little to no career development Acumen is a corporate company that is still run like a poorly mismanaged startup. You don’t have to go far at Acumen to hear stories or implicit references to the difficulties of dealing with management, particularly the CEO. Turnover remains very high within the company, including at the level of middle management. Bad habits of higher management end up trickling down to the lower levels, often to managers who are themselves still young and inexperienced. Bullying, poor communication, micromanagement, and a lack of transparency and honesty plague the management of certain parts of Acumen. I want to caveat this by saying that there are some better and nicer managers who do definitely care about their employees at Acumen. But there are those who don’t. In recent times the company has resorted to holding a brief training workshop for newly promoted managers. The training is very insufficient and basically uses a bandaid to treat the gunshot wound of continued turnover. Any progress that is built quickly evaporates the moment a more experienced or better manager leaves for greener pastures. In times of higher pressure, some inexperienced managers will simply throw the training out the door and start bullying subordinates. Information will be intentionally withheld, contradictory feedback will be given, employees will be called out for “errors” that turn out later to be correct, and managers will ignore and exclude employees they don’t like. Sometimes employees will be lied to and (lied about) in private even as a façade of professionalism is put on the outside. As other reviews have pointed out, manager quality is highly inconsistent within the firm. The relatively more recent measures like 360 performance reviews and manager training have served as a corporate cover for what remains a highly unregulated management environment. For its part, HR continues to defend bad management, not employees. Policies like “open door” management continue to remain cliché buzzwords that the company uses even as it continues to act in secretive and passive-aggressive ways towards employees. There also exists considerable inconsistency in behavioral standards at Acumen. Some employees will get a free pass on showing up to meetings late, while others won’t. Some managers may say inappropriate or offensive things after client calls that are clearly not professional. Many of the owner’s family occupy top positions at the company, and office politics and favoritism continue to exist at the lower departmental levels. Directors will treat some employees really nicely while others will be almost completely ignored. It’s even gotten to the petty point where some managers/directors will pretend to look down at their phones in the hallways to be able to pretend not to look at someone they don’t like. There are also cases where promotions/raises have been withheld for arbitrary reasons. Pay at the firm is a good deal below market, and implicit promises that raises or bonuses during the 6-month review periods will equalize your pay are generally unfounded. Workflow at Acumen also has significant problems. The firm continues to do a poor job of efficiently or effectively allocating work. Some employees have nothing to do, while others are swamped. Even in the same department or team, there may be little work for weeks, and then all of a sudden a huge spike in new content and deliverables that have to be delivered on a short timeline. Much of this workflow inconsistency is not a product of poor clients but rather poor delegation of work by management. A director may put a hold on an analysis at the last minute to make an objection that could have been made much sooner. Other times directors will simply ignore or forget about other submissions that need approval to move forward. Some managers will insist on having a brand new tasks completed on short deadlines that later get ignored without any approvals or feedback. In addition, the knowledge base of the company continues to operate in a state of disrepair. Much of the project knowledge at Acumen continues to rely on word-of-mouth communication. Acumen’s few written resources are highly general and continue not to cover basic key information that applies to much of the firm. Micromanagement of work is frequent. Some teams may grant more autonomy initially but will devolve into more micromanagement as time goes on. Both management—and some clients—have become so obsessed with syntax or terminology to the point of causing a never-ending door of administrative and proofreading work for DPAs. This is despite the fact that often these terminology changes are discretionary and do not necessarily have a basis in technical literature or academia. The firm is constantly policing small changes in work while losing sight of the bigger picture of analysis quality and how work gets done. If you were looking to develop policy or research analysis skills, look elsewhere. As others have pointed out, much of the work is tedious and repetitive. The firm no longer works in areas like social or labor policy, despite continuing to advertise as such on its website and job postings. The knowledge you learn is usually highly specific to a particular team, and much of it is useless outside the firm. Asking for more meaningful tasks or development is met—at best—with empty promises that management has no intention of following up on.
