Exponent reviews

The expectations are high, the people who are successful have to sacrifice their personal lives, family, and selves to succeed. I have to be honest, I thought I could continue to do that after 4 years of graduate school but the burn out is real. Single income and not wanting to live in a tiny apartment is practically impossible off the salary of Exponent in the heart of the Bay Area. There is an attempt to teach management skills to supervisors but it often falls flat due to the nature of the person who is successful at Exponent - data driven, antisocial, blunt people with doctorate degrees in engineering. Not sure what they expected to happen.

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.