Sadly, the cons to working at Fragomen outweigh the pros.
1. No Training
Like I said earlier, you don't need immigration experience to start working as an AP1, but the training experience to learn what you need to know is stressful because there is no process. Every person is assigned a "mentor" and "trainer" when they start, but most of us end up getting assigned cases we have no experience with and just have to figure it out on our own. This can be really stressful because we are dealing with people's visas and jobs. Depending on your team, there is little or no oversight on your cases, so sometimes mistakes aren't noticed until months after things have been filed. The worst part is, even though our work is supposed to be reviewed at every stage of the process by attorneys and senior managers with decades of experience, mistakes are always blamed on the AP1.
2. Terrible Communication
Once you survive the "training" at Fragomen, you start to realize how sad the communication skills are in the office. We've had monthly and weekly meetings about "standardization," but every team still does things a different way anyway. This is partly due to the lack of leadership of some of the Partners, since most seem to be incommunicado. There are so many people who have met the wrath of the partners when you don't meet their unreasonable expectations and ended up leaving because of the stress. Fragomen hires brand new college graduates, but then expects them to have zero mistakes and know the ins and outs of immigration in a few months. Then there a some people who will actually help you but they're so overworked that they're working 50-60 hours a week just to keep up with the workload.
The other side of the terrible communication coin is that people are downright belittling to you if something is not going their way. These people have never learned how to manage a team of people, or how to treat your employees with respect, or how to care about their employees unless its about how many filings your team is getting done aka how much money you're making them. Some managers are very rude and have said sexist things in the middle of meetings where all the partners are, and no one says anything.
3. Mishandling Coronavirus
If you asked the partners, they would probably give themselves a pat on the back for how they handled the coronavirus situation in our office. In reality, the partners continued to put employees lives at risk well after the state of emergency in Atlanta and even after there were several reports of a couple people possibly being exposed and coming into the office. Luckily, most people do not have to be in the office now, but the partners won't give us any idea of what their plan is and there are still people who have to go into the office. Many partners don't wear any protective gear when they are in the office.
4. Moving Offices
Earlier this year, the partners announced that we would be moving a to a new office. Currently, AP1s all have a spacious individual cubicle with three desk tables, our own printer, and a storage cabinet. We can have 50-90 cases at any given time and the files for these cases are required, so we need a lot of storage space to work and to keep files. After some time, APs are moved to a shared office, where we share an office space with another AP, and we have our own bookshelf and can have calls with clients and foreign nationals with our doors closed since we have a lot more calls. The new office is laughable and just proves how the partners don't have any idea (or don't care) of what we do as APs. The partners decided that anyone who is not a manager will be stuck into a shared cubicle that is smaller than the individual cubicles we had. So, instead of having a private space for being on calls, storage space for all of our files, we will be right behind someone else with one third of the storage space and one little locker for our things. Additionally, we will no longer have our own printers, and even though we go through hundreds of sheets of paper for our filings, we'll have to spend half the workday getting up to go wait on a shared printer. There was no opportunity for feedback.
5. Sexism and Racism in the office
I admit that I didn't always realize the sexist and racist things that happen around the office, but it is so obvious at Fragomen that after two years of being here it gets to you. HR is useless since they bow down to the partners. Not to mention that there are people who have worked here for years sating racist and sexist things that the partners know about but there are no consequences here unless you make a mistake on a H-1B filing.
Lesson of the story is Fragomen is fine for a few months, but don't come here for a long term career unless you can take the constant belittling and rudeness from managers because HR will not protect you if you say something against it.
