Toxic environment and poor management overshadow good peers
Pros
Your peers are some of the best and brightest in the industry.
Cons
Nothing is done about abusive and toxic employees. I heard certain employees berating and yelling at people on daily conference calls. Some of those calls had the IT director at the time on those calls. Nothing was said to rein in those employees. Same IT director denied me my raise and my yearly bonus. At Ryan you review yourself at the end of the year and then your manager / higher up goes over your review to ensure you aren't just giving yourself unwarranted A+ ratings on everything. At this point in time our CISO and our Infosec manager had quit. So our reviews were being done by the IT director at the time. I was using Udemy to study up on certifications to better do my job with the company. Problem is that with Udemy the second you click on a lesson or video on the sidebar it marks it as complete. Regardless if you watched the video / lesson for 2 hours or 2 seconds. During my review I informed the IT Director that I felt I was making good progress towards my certs but that Udemy was a poor metric to measure me against since the entire website can be "gamed" quite easily. I even showed examples. What did my honesty get me? I received a sub standard review grading, I was denied a raise, denied my bonus and told that if I ever informed my superiors again that I had "cheated" in my review goals I could face termination. Every year Ryan gives it's employees a week off for "spring break" however you are told that particular perk hinges on positive reviews on the company you are expected to make so it can keep getting listed on DMagazine, Forbes and whomever else's "Best places to work" lists. The pay is barely at market rate. At least it was when I was there a few years back. Employees fought to get pay transparency for over a year constantly bringing it up during monthly talks with the owner of the company. Honestly I feel like the IT Director not understanding that I was trying to be fair and transparent in my review and grading me so harshly could actually be put in the Pros section above. That incident was the catalyst to get me to find a better job and finally quit after almost 5 years there.