GLG reviews

People: The root of the problem at GLG is the people. The people drive significant dysfunction throughout the entire organization, from top to bottom. At the junior level, the large majority lack sufficient training and experience to do the job that would truly put GLG ahead of competitors, so the work has evolved to serve the "least common denominator" employee, and became extremely mundane and boring for the good ones. They are taught only the most basic of basic skills in order to function at a barely acceptable level. They are fresh out of college and in dire need of robust training, which we completely miss the bar on at a massive scale. At the senior level, you have two types of people: 1) People who "grew up" at GLG, and therefore truly lack sufficient skills to do anything anywhere else, and therefore must be cutthroat, egotistical and highly unethical to survive (i.e., stealing work and presenting to senior colleagues as their own, lying, and in general being self-serving above and beyond the health of the company), and 2) People who came in with sufficient experience to drive impact, but are usually quick to depart because of the massive infrastructure challenges, including org, tech, and talent. Career advancement: My biggest regret is choosing to work for this firm, because it has been a terrible waste of time. Essentially, whatever talent and experience level you have when you come in is exactly what you will have when you leave. You will NOT grow here, so don't come in expecting to. You will have a tougher time in your search for the next thing, because what you do and what you learn at GLG is not valuable. Also, you are simply not working with high caliber people when you come to GLG, so don't expect to "learn from the best", the "best" are not here and they will not come here. Tech: Let's stop pretending we are a tech company, or even a bare minimum tech-enabled company. Our engineers are as incompetent as they are arrogant, and nothing is happening on the tech front unless a HUGE change is made over many many years. The large extent of GLG's internal problems are tech-driven, and there is virtually NO accountability in the tech function. Don't believe for a second that the ones who caused all of the issues will be the ones who fix them.

Where should I start? 1.) The work is not stimulating, you don't learn anything, it's very administrative. The title and the department has "Research" in the name but you are not doing ANY research here. They are trying to move away from the research title now but don't think you'll be using any type of quantitative skills or completing multi-day research projects. If you liked research in school or like to work on things over an extended period of time steer clear. 2.) The sales culture here is awful and borderline unethical. You will be asked to sell and upsell phone calls and other research anywhere you can. You will call analysts and try to sell them meetings they don't need and they don't know how much they cost. I genuinely don't believe GLG's clients understand the massive amount of money they pay for the services and GLG won't go out of their way to tell them. The company just views clients as deep pockets. 3.) Management is some of the worst in the country for a company of this size. There are two types of people that work there. The ones who hate working there and are looking for a way out (probably about half the company), and the ones that are strong individual contributors and develop and "I'm better than you attitude" (The other half of the company). You have managers with no experience outside of college that worked their way up by doing meaningless work with a healthy amount of brown nosing. Because of this you won't find any mentors with substance here or anyone with connections to help you in the future. 4.) Working culture is just as bad as sales culture. Very, very few people actually care about the work they do here. Instead they care about getting ahead and working their way to the next rung in the ladder. This fosters a very poor culture of day-to-day distaste in the work while the ones that are there for the long-haul are only there for the position of "leadership" and power. GLG brands itself as a learning company but none of their employees actually learn, pretty ironic. 5.) Work life balance is non existent. You receive about 400+ emails a day that you're expected to respond to within about 10 minutes. If you're not at your desk at any point in the day upper management starts to suspect you're slipping and will put you on a leash. People brag about answering emails at 1am and nobody can go to a meeting without checking their phone or laptop every 30 seconds.