Exponent Associate reviews

The company's primary metric for evaluating the employees for bonuses and promotions is the utilization ratio (# of billable hours to non-billable hours). This is extremely ironic given that when you first start out, all of your projects are assigned to you by your supervisor, meaning you have no control over how "well" you're doing at the company. Not a big issue if there's plenty of work to go around but once there isn't enough work for everyone, people becomes very competitive and protective of their work. It also creates very uncomfortable situations where certain members are told that they're doing amazing because they've been put on a project that requires a lot of hours and certain members are begging others for work. People worry about taking their vacation days because it'll bring down their UT. It's not really an environment where employees feel valued as human beings. Most of the times, the job is not very intellectually challenging. There will be times where you feel like you've become a glorified paralegal with a PhD for your manager or principal.

The previous review posted on Aug 18, 2023 said it all already, I highly recommend people to go read it (title "Your worthiness is ultimately determined by how much money you can bring into the company"). I will add to the parts that were not being discussed in details. Hostile working environment: people are super competitive against each others and tend to not share work across different practices because they want to keep the revenue to themselves. It is very ironic, as Exponent likes to claim that it has interdisciplinary teams. Some offices do have nicer coworkers in general, but still not the best. Right now, everyone wants to hoard all the billable hours to not get fired. Different practices don't communicate with each others: Exponent likes to claim that it has interdisciplinary teams, but they don't actually work together that much. For example, the recent mass layoffs let go of people with backgrounds and skill sets that other practices are still hiring for to this date. The company did not even consider doing internal transfer. Lack of good managers: being a manager in Exponent means your main job is to bring clients and projects into the company. Managers have to make sure both themselves and the associates/senior associates working under them have enough work to do. Sad news is, Exponent has a lot of managers who like to do solo work and not share projects. Since managers do need to hire people for the company to get themselves promoted, they often just get new-hire in and leave them be. They expect new-hire to ask for work from somewhere else without offering guidance. If you are hired by one of those managers, you are basically on your own. Useless HR: the group of most non-genuine and inefficient people you would ever meet. At Exponent, the HR works 100% for the company, not the employees. They get back to emails super slow and often times speak to employees in a very poor way. After the recent mass layoffs, the Chief HR Officer was touring different office locations and trying to claim people down. However, during Q&A sessions, they basically dodged and/or toned down every question related to layoffs. They offered zero insights and only stated the layoff was a one-time rare occasion without explaining why they made the decisions. Poor planning from the company: if you look at the job board now, you can see that Exponent started to post a lot of job openings after just two weeks from the mass layoffs. This clearly shows poor-planning and lacks of insightfulness.