Great Company Culture Won't Help Me Pay My Student Loans
Pros
Farnsworth Group strives to be the very best at what they do. You'll have strong engineering managers who are technical geniuses and who want to help you learn. You'll learn entirely by doing--it's sink or swim, so be ready to hit the ground running. And they staff lean, so there's no room for deadweight. You will gain a ton of experience in a hurry and quickly become an expert in your niche field. The company culture is great - most offices are absolutely zero drama. For being a profession stereotypically full of nerds, they do a great job of selecting for personable employees. Have fun, do your work, everybody gets along. Work/life balance is pretty good; you'll be busy, but there's enough flexibility to work in whatever you need to get done, as long as you come back and finish your assigned work. If you get a shareholder position then I'm sure that's a pretty good gig, the company makes BANK for its shareholders. Senior managers only. If you happen to live in Central Illinois near the company's headquarters, your pay is market value and right in line with your cost of living.
Cons
If, however, you live in Chicago, LA, or Colorado, you will not be compensated anywhere NEAR your market worth. They pay the exact same wages company-wide and have apparently never heard of cost of living adjustments. It's worse if you're entry level. Your offer will come in low. Raises are consistently under 3% a year. Promotions help you catch up but don't come until you've been doing that job description for a couple of years already. It takes a lot of time to move up. That really good company culture is apparently worth 20% of your potential salary. Upper management's really big into the double-talk. They'll post 18% profits for six straight quarters and then talk about how they're drowning. They'll way underbid projects just to get them and then blame you for the overruns. One quarter they'll emphasize billing all your hours; the next quarter they'll emphasize saving project budgets, then it flips, every, single, quarter. Nobody's ever thought to just adjust the billing rates. They're a medium-sized company trying to play in big-city markets with small-town sensibilities. I've watched the growing pains, things have gotten better but there's still more growing to do, and still more pain to come. High demand for hours, the 40-hour week is rare, but that's a consulting gig for you.
