A "Family Business" with a wide breadth of initiatives and experiences to be had
Pros
The breadth of initiatives that Vulcan takes on is amazingly wide: the scope ranges from local to global, internal media projects to world-changing initiatives like climate change and ocean health. The compensation package is a good: salary midpoint targets at 60th percentile of the market, reasonable vacation and personal days that increase with tenure, private gym in the building, health club reimbursement, good health care coverage, and all kinds of fringe benefits that come with ownership of three major sports teams. The company is at the size where there's diversity of activity, but small enough where one could get to know almost everyone in the company, and the people working here are talented and great to work with.
Cons
Vulcan is after all a "family business", and there are idiosyncrasies that come along with that. Vertical communication, up and down, is not healthy: there is some "yes"-men/women mentality, and I think honesty in interactions suffer for that. Despite being an organization owned by a billionaire, there is an unreasonable financial austerity when it comes to HR that can sometimes stifle growth of employees and success of projects. In my opinion, the performance appraisal process here is very counterproductive. Employees are graded on a curve (remember college courses?) HR rejects the notion of "stack ranking", but under the hood, managers have to stack rank to determine how their teams members are distributed under the curve. The curve is determined by how well the company and department has been rated that year. The PA and goal-setting processes together extend over several months.
