Pros
The company promotes a healthy work-life balance. The hours were generally reasonable and each employee gets 20 vacation days when they start. Additionally, FactSet offers generous benefits: $8.00 contribution towards your lunch 4 days a week, solid insurance plans, immediate 401K enrollment and matching, and paternity leave. I also loved my coworkers. The firm tends to recruit people who are smart but not egotistical and driven but not overly competitive.
Cons
Broadly speaking, product management at FactSet is divided into two categories: application management and content management. I worked on the content management side, and I'm not sure that I would recommend this department to potential employees. For starters, the content management team doesn't have much of a culture. The firm doesn't offer much training in key skills for the role like SQL querying, data analysis, technical spec writing, or agile project management. Nor does the firm plan forums or events to discuss best practices for content management. Additionally, the compensation in this department is underwhelming. The baseline salaries are somewhat competitive for the industry, but the raises don't provide strong incentives to work harder. In previous years, receiving a performance rating of "outstanding" meant that you received a 3-4% raise rather than a 1-2% raise if your rating was "meets expectations". This year, I spoke with several people who received ratings of "meets expectations" and received 0% raises. The low raises would have been less disappointing if FactSet had paid annual bonuses to its content managers, but it didn't. The lack of professional development efforts and disappointing compensation lead me to recommend against working in the content management division of FactSet. However, I tended to receive positive feedback from my colleagues on the Datafeed and Analytics teams. If you would like to work for FactSet, then I would recommend that you pursue an opening in one of these departments.
