Nielsen reviews

I liked Nielsen when I first started working. As of 2020, Upper Management started coming down hard on employees with performance expectations. If there are any slight miscommunications, they treat employees as if their being dishonest or have ulterior motives right off the bat. This creates a very low morale. Quality is also constantly dropping in on you and listening to your calls and watching your screens. You're under pressure of getting people on the phone to agree while forced to follow a very flawed script. If Quality sees you missed even the slightest word, you get reprimanded. Your performance is not always based on you but rather whether people want to participate or not because we do ask for a lot of personal information. Very stressful! Your job is always on the line and not at all worth all that effort for what you're getting paid! They cut back on incentives and micromanage more now.

There's a lot here to unpack. The key one is salaries. Right now, it is impossible to break the 100K salary mark unless you have spent atleast 7-9 years within the company. This is a joke considering the number of firms that are able to hire out of college at that salary level. Overall salary level have been the same for the last 15 years in nominal terms not accounting for inflation. As a result, it is not uncommon to see the brightest and best leave within the first 2 years. Attrition at senior levels to more product oriented companies with actual growth plans (instead of where a -5% decline YoY is seen as something to cheer) is also very apparent, and anecdotally I've heard of people 2xing their salary out the gate with such jumps at a bare minimum - an indication of the scale of the problem. As a result, the only people who are left are by definition the ones who couldn't go anywhere else, or the ones who value the intangibles of the company (good work/life balance, strong sense of community) which also comes with caveats; work life balance has eroded significantly (think 40 hours weeks to 55 hour weeks over the past 5 years), and the community has - intentionally or not - become racially and gender insular, both from a hiring and a growth track perspective. The company also continues to stumble in actually meeting customer needs, allowing upstart startups (some of which were founded by ex-employees) to come in and capture significant share and growth. The business unit I was in has not seen any positive year over year growth in the past decade.