Pros
- As other reviews mention, most of your immediate co-workers will be very bright, driven people - Company-wide training for new analysts is robust and offers a good introduction to a fairly obscure statistical programming language in SAS - Tremendous breadth and depth of available CMS data; fascinating to have access to from the perspective of anyone interested in Medicare/Medicaid
Cons
- Your experience at this company will live and die by your manager's capabilities. Managers are frequently promoted from within (not an inherently bad thing!) and given very little training before being assigned direct reports; some few will do fine with this, of course, but the average person is certainly not ready to lead projects of the complexity normal at Acumen right out of the box, so to speak. You will not, if your team is anything like mine was, have the opportunity to give feedback to your manager; the organization is very hierarchical and top-down. A "love it or leave it" attitude is common. - A culture of fear very much exists; mistakes are often treated as malicious and notifying your manager of an issue you've found is just as likely to get you berated for not finding it sooner as it is thanked for noticing it. The CEO is prone to outbursts, and some in the company seem to take that fact as license to behave unprofessionally towards their subordinates as well. - Depending on your team, the work you're actually asked to perform may bear little or no resemblance to the job description or how the job is pitched during the interview process. My role, which I thought would be geared towards conducting novel statistical analysis, turned out to be much more focused on integrating new code/analyses into an extremely fickle and complicated existing codebase, something not at all suited to my background or interests. It does not appear as though an individual's interests or background are taken much, if at all, into account when assigning them to a team after joining the company. - Compensation is very, very poor in light of where they've chosen to locate their offices. Not at all comparable to firms doing similar work in similar places.
