Pros
You will work with some of the best people you’ve ever met. This ensures you’ll have people to commiserate with during your terrible tenure at this company. Negotiate your salary because they will pay you whatever you want to get you to join.
Cons
Honestly, the first year is not all that bad. You have young, fun co-workers and not a ton of responsibility outside of training. Even when you first start, you will work a minimum of 10 hours in slow season (8:30 AM – 6:30 PM are “client service hours”) and additional hours during tax season. Once you are promoted and have more responsibility, the real misery begins. AG brings in more clients than its staff can handle. People claim the business is growing, but it’s more of a revolving door with people constantly leaving so they are always short-staffed and your work load soon exceeds the amount of hours you have in a day to complete your work. I will admit, I worked for many team leads who were laid back about coming and going for appointments or leaving early if I had something I needed to take care of or a family event to attend, but I was never able to do these things because of the insane amount of work on my plate, and my daily jam-packed calendar. AG has also taken a respectable profession and turned it into a joke. You will not feel like you are providing a benefit to your clients, and in fact you will become racked with guilt due to constantly over billing them. For example, it is common practice at AG to give a “budget” of hours for a task. You write a case study, you can bill 10 hours, even if it only took you 30 minutes to write that case study. You will feel bad billing like this, but you have to in order to get your bonus, meet your metrics and not be ranked dead last against your co-workers. And yes, they literally rank you against your co-workers based on various metrics many of which are out of your control. The rankings affect your promotions and over-all worth to the company. I could go on and on but the last thing I will say is that the managers and team leads have literally sold their soul to this company. They eat, drink, and spew AG koolaid until they are a shell of their former selves. They must become like this in order to get promoted and keep their jobs. The core values are memorized and twisted by them to throw their co-workers under the bus. For example, you will absolutely not get promoted if you can’t demonstrate the “transparency” core value which means telling on your friends if they say negative things about the company or even hanging out with ex-AG co-workers who the company now deems as toxic. It is literally disgusting. Everything will come full circle though when these managers come to you looking for a job once you’ve moved on.