Pros
Very smart and friendly colleagues; really high standard of work quality; interesting projects (most of the time); convenient office location with access to public transit; acceptable salary for the city I worked in; growth potential for certain roles is certainly possible; employee-owned; solid infrastructure for accounting/IT/administration/formatting experts that made it easy to just focus on the research in a research role; awesome flexibility about WFH that made it easy to do so around doctor's appointments or to lengthen a business trip (this was a top benefit and I really appreciated it - it really demonstrated trust in employees and effective monitoring of performance rather than monitoring employee butt-in-seat time); offices for most employees instead of cubes/open floor plan (also an awesome benefit that made it 1000x easier to focus); good onboarding process for new employees.
Cons
Cons: Absurdly long and unnecessarily bureaucratic hiring process (literally months long and with well over a dozen people - at some point there were diminishing returns); salaries are not adjusted based on office location, leading to laughable salaries in high-COL cities that are well below competitors; combined PTO bank, which discourages people from staying home when they're sick because they don't want to lose vacation time; failure to bring staff who left to obtain higher education back into the fold (despite claiming an interest in doing so); cost-cutting measures that were done on the sly and with no employee input; no paid maternity leave; have to bill hours and was (possibly illegally) discouraged from recording overtime when it was necessary for my job. At one point, I wanted to work there again and I still miss the high quality standards and some of the cultural aspects, like being WFH-friendly, but the benefits and salaries aren't where they should be and there was a disconnect between what Corporate said they promoted in terms of employee growth and wellness and what they actually did. If I were in power, I'd streamline hiring to obtain top talent, add a paid maternity leave policy, bump up salaries to be competitive, find better ways to solicit and utilize employee input, and focus on developing junior staff to be high performers for the long-term.