Pros
Worked at GLG for nearly 2 years, coffee and office is nice. Austin is a great city. They try to make the mundane, high-stress work and culture better with food and bevs about once a week.
Cons
Where should I start? 1.) The work is not stimulating, you don't learn anything, it's very administrative. The title and the department has "Research" in the name but you are not doing ANY research here. They are trying to move away from the research title now but don't think you'll be using any type of quantitative skills or completing multi-day research projects. If you liked research in school or like to work on things over an extended period of time steer clear. 2.) The sales culture here is awful and borderline unethical. You will be asked to sell and upsell phone calls and other research anywhere you can. You will call analysts and try to sell them meetings they don't need and they don't know how much they cost. I genuinely don't believe GLG's clients understand the massive amount of money they pay for the services and GLG won't go out of their way to tell them. The company just views clients as deep pockets. 3.) Management is some of the worst in the country for a company of this size. There are two types of people that work there. The ones who hate working there and are looking for a way out (probably about half the company), and the ones that are strong individual contributors and develop and "I'm better than you attitude" (The other half of the company). You have managers with no experience outside of college that worked their way up by doing meaningless work with a healthy amount of brown nosing. Because of this you won't find any mentors with substance here or anyone with connections to help you in the future. 4.) Working culture is just as bad as sales culture. Very, very few people actually care about the work they do here. Instead they care about getting ahead and working their way to the next rung in the ladder. This fosters a very poor culture of day-to-day distaste in the work while the ones that are there for the long-haul are only there for the position of "leadership" and power. GLG brands itself as a learning company but none of their employees actually learn, pretty ironic. 5.) Work life balance is non existent. You receive about 400+ emails a day that you're expected to respond to within about 10 minutes. If you're not at your desk at any point in the day upper management starts to suspect you're slipping and will put you on a leash. People brag about answering emails at 1am and nobody can go to a meeting without checking their phone or laptop every 30 seconds.