Stay away or get ready for the flood - Associate Lab49 Employee Review

1.0
Dec 2, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Decent resume builder / breadth of experience in different topics. Some good people left. Benefits aren't bad. Seem to have some good people in London and DC. Everything seems easy after working at Lab49.

Cons

Bonuses scheduled to be paid in April, actually paid between June - Nov even though you read online that the global CEO pays himself 9 digits a year as he buys more and more companies. Company sells itself as doing attractive front office projects with great design but banks don't actually outsource that kind of work. Hero culture where you are asked to work weekends to deliver on some unrealistic deadline instead of good management and setting projects up for success. NY culture is toxic, especially heads of strategy and project management who are verbally insulting. They seem to get it that way from the CEO and then quickly pass the buck. No support system for training / learning and development even though you get graded on it at eval time. CEO actively avoids having to interact with the proletariat staff. Low-ball all the offers and you have to fight annually for market pay directly with the lab CEO. It seems like the positive Glassdoor reviews are written by a select group of new people that management is trying to isolate and treat well and encourage to write glassdoor reviews for the sole purpose of saving their rating.

Explore other reviews about Lab49

5.0
Sep 16, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Working groups around Blockchain, AI, and other interesting topics - Book Club - Open and transparent leadership team

Cons

- Uncertainty around what you will be working - Can do a great job on a project, and still be left on the bench when it is finished

2
4.0
May 26, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Hiring is well-gated, so you'll work with smart people. Projects are exclusively in finance so it's a great place to gain exposure in that industry. You operate with a good amount of autonomy.

Cons

It's a consulting company, so engineers are only valuable if they're billable. That means your success is tied to someone else's ability to secure a pipeline of work for you, or your own ability to upsell at your engagement - which may or may not be up to you no matter what you do. There isn't a dedicated sales team at Lab, so this can get spotty. Upper management's presence is felt in seasons - non-existant for months at a time, all over everything the next. They were nowhere to be found as AI got rolled out massively in 2026 and we got caught without a strategy and action plan - either for leveraging internally or for pivoting our model.

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