Pros
Very flexible schedule and ability to work from home (or entirely remotely). Decent PTO and sick time. Health benefits package is decent. Casual dress. Almost all staff have offices with doors. Kitchens on every floor in Rockville. Can walk to metro from office in Rockville. Frederick office is expanding and in good location/ Diverse office environment with large international presence and women in management positions. Middle management is generally friendly and will back you up when dealing with sponsors. Many different research areas to choose from. Secure work environment - not immediately impacted by gov't shut downs, reshuffled if a contract ends to a new project. Ability to take on tasks and a lot of responsibility quickly. Now has an extensive on boarding training program.
Cons
Underpaid by a wide margin - salary bands have not budged much in /years/ and are already below market average. No career advancement - employees get stuck in the same low pay band for years because there is no advancement opportunities besides the dull rinse/repeat cycle of the same tasks on different projects unless you wait up to a decade to maybe be made a Project Manager. Most DMs stay for no more than 2-4 years before realizing their career and pay has stalled for the foreseeable future. No standardization of work and non descriptive job title - this leads to different people doing different levels of work on different projects being called the same thing and paid the same. A Data Manager could be expected to be a Business Analyst, Database Manager, Admin Coordinator, a Clinical Monitor, deputy SAS programmer, Protocol Expert, a Systems Analyst, a Data Analyst with people skills enough to deal with stakeholders and sites and required to provide corporate contributions in the span of a project's life but the title and pay remain basic and low. Corporate is detached and HR is absentee. Despite numerous complaints for as long as this Glassdoor page has been active regarding pay, lack of paid maternity leave (or paternity leave), only 1 additional floating holiday after 10 years served for PTO, and a poor method of annual reviews, the script remains the same. Bonuses for most were slashed last year and they declined to give us off on Dec 24th and 26th for the first time in recent memory. We've taken a bunch of different surveys and almost never heard the results or what happens with them. Due to this lack of employee investment company wide coupled with the poor DM conditions, we've lost DMs faster than we could replace them and current DMs are constantly training new ones. If the strategy was not to invest in DM longevity due to their replaceability, that strategy is quickly becoming unsustainable in a tight market with DC and VA competition. TLDR; If you want a job that pays like it's 2019 and has a career path, don't look here.