Pros
As stated in the title of this review, the benefits are great with a variety of healthcare options and unique offerings other companies don't provide. Free food and snacks were provided daily, which for me veer into the connotation of "you won't have enough time to cook so we're trying to make up for it," but overall it is a nice gesture, especially if you don't cook. The people were generally nice, and the conversations were usually enjoyable.
Cons
Before I start, I want to clarify that I was an HQ employee, and this review is for InquisIT HQ only. A contractor under InquisIT will have a different experience. The biggest drawback to working at InquisIT was what I call the "work hard, play hard" culture. This doesn't sound so bad at first until you realize that it is used to rationalize destructive working practices and the inability of management to provide reasonable expectations for employees. In this type of culture, burnout is normalized and spreading employees thin only to sometimes love bomb them with perks is the norm. This is the exact type of culture I would personally define InquisIT as having. While great rewards were promised for our hard work, in my experience they never came to fruition due to poor management and unrealistic expectations. InquisIT may promise, "we provide free food, flexible scheduling, and the ability to work remote!" All of those statements are true, but for me they all also pointed towards one thing: InquisIT having more control and input into my life than I do. Relying on InquisIT for food because I had no time to cook after working grueling hours, allowing InquisIT the highest priority over my daily schedule since I was required to be flexible to all demands, and taking InquisIT home after a long day just to work more hours slowly grated on me. Finally, I came to the conclusion that InquisIT views work life balance as antiquated, replacing it with "if you enjoy your job you'll never get tired of it because it becomes your life." However, no matter how much passion a person has about any work task, it doesn't change the fact that an employee's life has competing priorities and multiple interests. Near the end of my stay, I felt like a grunt worker being thrown fun toys and perks to distract me from the fact that I was a person with other priorities and things that I valued in life. The "play hard" portion of a "work hard, play hard" culture is meant to replace work life balance, in turn removing the accountability from the company to put effort into maintaining consistent and reasonable expectations for an employee's workload. This ties into my next point. Accountability, in my opinion, was missing. I felt if I brought up how burned out I was, it was subtly pushed back onto me. As a result, it took me a while to realize that I wasn't the source of my overwork, it was simply poor management. Management frequently missed deadlines without repercussion, using their authority and busyness as an excuse. While unexpected changes are common in any workplace, the amount of work deadlines being shifted around to excuse poor resource management and processes being modified to suit a whim seemed much higher than normal. No matter how hard I worked to use the flexible schedule given to me to be proactive and create my own balance, there would be a last minute delegation or schedule change that increased or extended workload. This made it nearly impossible to plan for short or long-term personal goals, as my daily workload was constantly shifting up and down. Over time, this lack of what I perceive to be clear structure and consistency from management, along with the inability to plan for my life as promised through a flexible schedule, caused me to deeply resent the work I was once passionate about excelling in. The high turnover was another drawback. Turnover is a normal part of business, but when half of your team is fired and company employees quit without notice in a very small office of people, it points to a management problem. There were so many changes in my team that the focus on teamwork felt like a joke, and the normally pleasant "play hard" team events felt empty. In retrospect, a trend that seemed common in many of the relinquished employees was that they valued having clear boundaries in their work. If you're considering working at InquisIT, please consider what is important to you. I don't believe that the company has bad intentions, but the "work hard, play hard" mindset that I personally believe drives their decisions does not support a healthy work environment for employees. The pay for my role was about the average market rate, and definitely not enough to compensate for the hard work and valued time I contributed. If you don't mind frequent burnout and thrive on unpredictability with big promises of reward, this is a great fit. If you like to be able to plan and organize your life and your work as an individual, stay far away.