At the end of the day, you are making it less frustrating for constituents to pay their taxes and for other things to their government. It’s not an extremely exciting problem to solve.
The interview process is brutal for an entry-level role. A logic test, a writing sample, an HR interview, a panel interview, and then a super day of interviews with case studies, a presentation, and potentially meeting the co-founders. I made it through interviews for more senior positions and higher pay that were significantly less intense. Pro tip: if you’re told the co-founders were busy at the end of your final interview day and couldn’t meet with you, you might not have gotten the job. The co-founders won’t meet with any candidates that have been already rejected by their performance in previous interviews.
Once you’re hired, you are still potentially on the chopping block. I’ve seen plenty of folks get fired during onboarding, which is as much of a trial process as the initial interviews.
In my experience, your great experiences will be positive, but your negative experiences can be intense. I’ve spoken with folks who left voluntarily and folks who were let go, and I wasn’t alone.
There is a tremendous amount to learn as a BA, and it will take you time to have a full handle on things. I remember as a newbie asking a senior person when they felt like they finally understood things, and they said three years. That was my experience, too.
There is little DE&I here. The owners are also socially conservative, which does influence the company culture. I imagine this lack of political stance makes GSG more appealing to government clients. If you want to work for a company that takes a stronger stance on social issues, this isn’t the place for you.
The company only hires for a handful of roles, none of them management or senior. If you are farther along in your tech career, I would not apply here.
In my experience, the company is growing faster than its culture can keep up. The product I worked on is primarily staffed by folks who have less than two years of experience, many of whom on the business side have little technical experience prior to GSG.
GSG is extremely opaque when it comes to pay, and there is a lot of pay asymmetry. This asymmetry matters more as you become more senior. GSG discourages talking about pay with your coworkers (they cannot ban that discussion, as that would be illegal). Personally, I found my conversations about pay with my coworkers to be extremely useful and helpful in determining whether I was making what I was worth and should be advocating for myself.
Office politics exist here, despite what GSG may claim when talking about its culture, and they are crucial to understand if you hope to rise the ranks or do not want to be pigeonholed into a role you do not want to do. There are a handful of people that, if you rub them the wrong way or don’t give them the right impression, can put a cap on your career at GSG or cut your time at GSG short.
There is a bit of a “drink the Kool-Aid” vibe here that GSG is irreproachable in its ways and culture, which I think distracts from addressing the problems that exist within the company.
Middle management is a significant problem, as noted in other reviews. In my 5+ years in the company, I never participated in any upwards feedback as a part of the performance review process. I’ve had managers here that ranged from unhelpful to actively hurtful. I also had a few managers early in my career that were brilliant and cared about me as a person, but they were the exception rather than the rule.
There are no defined career path or paths for advancement here on the business side. This worked when GSG was a smaller company that could handle folks making their own career paths, but those days are gone with a much larger workforce. In my opinion, to scale they need to define career paths if want to encourage not turning folks over. Including myself, I have seen lots of people leave because their careers were not moving and weren’t receiving any meaningful professional development. Also, including myself, they often leave for a less demanding job that pays significantly more.
Job titles are primarily flat here. I know folks who have been a BA for over ten years. In principle, I don’t think titles are everything; but it becomes a problem when you want to take the next step in your career and need to communicate what you actually have done. GSG doesn’t use BA’s like most software companies, either, so using the GSG title may not help you communicate the nature of your work.
Speaking of BA’s, the BA role here is a mishmash of so many jobs that would have separate titles at other companies. While this is great for gaining experience, it’s frustrating when you do find what you want to focus on and still have three other jobs. Or when you feel underpaid for your work once you gain enough experience.
There is a general expectation that you figure out your work on your own without a lot of handholding. This can be challenging if you’re moving into a new role or team where you might be working on very different things and need to build new skills.
Doing things on your own for professional development, in my experience, wasn’t acknowledged in terms of compensation, and the company does not offer any PD benefits like a learning stipend or tuition reimbursement.
The more you learn about the current tech industry, the more obvious it becomes that GSG does things in a different, but not necessarily better, way. Product teams, for example, do not have design or QA teams – those things are done by BA’s and engineers themselves. This can make it more challenging to transition to a new role where you would be working with these different roles and need to show you have experience doing it.
