Pros
* Some teams do very interesting work. If you get on the right projects and have the right project partners, there are significant opportunities for growth. All new staff should seek to understand all internal teams and do their best to work on projects they find rewarding; Prosper will go to great lengths as an organization to align an employee's interests with company objectives. * Many genuinely good people. You will make many friends here. * Both a pro and a con: there is a serious lack of accountability on some teams. This means that if you are looking for a clock-in/clock-out job or a job where it is acceptable to show up late and leave early, you may have found your match!
Cons
It's hard to know where to begin: * The industry is absolutely brutal. It is extremely competitive and there is very little product differentiation. If the industry as a whole is doing well, a medium-sized player like Prosper will struggle for market share. If the industry or the market is not doing well (and we know those times will come), you can forget about it. There is massive downside risk with little upside - a totally unenviable market position and one that every new hire should accept coming in. * A serious lack of quality people managers. Many folks spend their days forwarding emails and holding meetings about meetings with very little actual work product to show for their efforts. * For a long time, a serious lack of HR leadership. This has, however, improved over the last year or so as new members have been brought to the team. * Lack of transparency around pay, promotion, and PTO. At the beginning of 2016, folks were told that pay adjustments were meager because 2016 was going to be a tough year (and it was). Then, at the beginning of 2017, pay adjustments were meager again...because 2016 was a tough year. * Some employees are allowed to take seemingly endless amounts of PTO without recourse. There is a complete lack of consistency around the enforcement of PTO policies. * In a company with a significant middle management layer, it becomes very hard to understand who contributed to what. This leaves employees with the option to either shamelessly and relentlessly promote themselves, or be looked over for promotions. * The CEO is a genuinely nice guy, but has been pushing his "nice guy" shtick a little bit too hard of late. When the business begins to turn, this routine will tire very, very quickly. * Consistent lack of success outside of personal loans. An attempt at a point-of-sale product and a foray into a personal finance app were both failures of epic proportions. Leadership has attempted to cast HELOC as a different sort of product (since "we built it from scratch") but that is also off to a rough start in every sense. * Understaffing across several teams and over long periods of time has led to some significant errors, and presents a significant risk exposure moving forward. See, for example, the recent $3mm settlement with the SEC for an error calculating investor returns. * Job titling is a mess. For example: "managers" who don't manage anyone or anything; "Head of XYZ" to describe roughly half of the staff on some teams. Settle on a nomenclature and stick to it. * Some teams are in a constant state of disarray and this prevents many initiatives from launching on time or at all. “We don’t have the engineering resources” might as well be Prosper’s slogan.
