Pros
For the most part people are friendly. There is plenty of work so it was never boring. Challenges abound. The area is great. It's a pretty cool company with interesting and challenging work, and except for a few bad apples, the people are pleasant.
Cons
The hours were very long. To preface this next con, most of the people who work here are pleasant and fair. However there were and still are, from what I have heard, a few bad apples that have spoiled it for some of the other more ethical employees. To start with, there were a few impossible-to-break cliques that excluded other employees and impeded productivity. Moreover and most troubling, certain upper management thought it was okay to fraternize and sleep around with their underlings, with multiple affairs going on sometimes for years at a time. Some, if not all of those "favored" underlings received promotions up the ranks, from what some say, unfairly, and they weren't always the best employees for the job. This caused friction with the employees who were unwilling to join the harem. If felt like there was competition and jealousy among the women, especially between the jilted ones and the newly "favored" ones. At times, it was quite hard on those of us who wanted to keep things strictly professional. I never wanted to leave my family to go out and get drunk with them but the ones who did and developed those unethical relationships with their managers seemed to get ahead faster and got the more interesting projects. Also, they were the ones who received the most and best mentoring from what it appeared like at the time. I've seen questions on Glasssoor about the mentorship program at Verisk. Maybe it is just a matter of this sometimes. Although, I'm not saying that this is always the case. In any case however, this type of favoritism, jealousy, competition for attention and sexual tension created problems in the workplace and, from my perspective, deterred cooperation and the free flowing of information that we needed to be effective. It is the belief by some, that certain people appear to have been promoted because of unethical favors and extra-marital affairs they've had with management, and apparently even vendors have done this. I cannot prove this because I have not bothered to collect evidence, but I have seen my share of sketchiness, so I don't particularly doubt it, and it did not seem fair to me. HR seemed helpless or uninterested in what was really going on, as long as those managers did their jobs satisfactorily. This is why I left. From what I have heard from friends, some of the upper managers and their favored playthings and mistresses have left the company and vendors have moved on. However, a few of the same unethical underlings are still there, as are a few that made it up to a high rank by allegedly "playing" with their bosses after work, and they are still making life difficult for certain other women who have to work with them on a daily basis. I wonder if some of the remaining unethical women are still looking for an unfair advantage. Something to think about. It's frustrating, because there are some things I was just not willing to do. I have mixed feelings about leaving. I wish I didn't feel that I had to in order to be promoted fairly but a few of those women made it unbearable. In the beginning, I really liked it there. In any case, it's a shame that this went on at Verisk because I might have actually continued working there otherwise. It's a pretty cool company with interesting and challenging work, and except for a few bad apples, the people are pleasant.
