Pros
I love the work that I do! I love my team, it's a great group of hardworking, knowledgeable, smart people who always take time to help each other and team up to get things done. My direct supervisor is amazing - laid back, resourceful, always willing to back me up or help me with issues, always reachable, but lets me do my thing. Remote work appreciated. Good culture with lots of ERG's Benefits are really good with a great 401k match. Unfortunately I don't get paid enough to be able to contribution much, but ya know, it's there.
Cons
Pay sucks. I'm in a project management role that pays $20k under market because it's not classified as project management. So we can only hire people fresh out of school or contractors, because people with experience in the benefits or retirement market aren't willing to take pay cuts to come here (I tried to get former coworkers to come and they were minimum $10k more than what Principal offered). Leadership does monthly "town halls" where they basically pat each other on the back for all of their hard work, and then tell us nothing's going to change for compensation. There does not seem to be any internal opportunity here. I've applied for dozens of internal roles and 99% of the time don't get past their recruiting screeners. The emails that come back often don't even have the job title or number in them so no way to even know which job I was rejected for not meeting "minimum qualifications" on a posting; when I followed up on it with recruiting, I heard "oops you do meet minimum qualifications but not xyz which the hiring manager needs" but wasn't listed in the job description. Basically the internal job application system is really bad. So there's not much hope to stay here at Principal or find something that pays better.
