Work literally anywhere else - Anonymous employee Charles River Associates Employee Review

- Very opaque promotion processes. Promotions are usually based on tenure/degree and not performance. You might be 5-6 years into the job and still have to babysit new PhD hires who know nothing and make 100K more than you in base salary. - All your bosses are Econ PhDs and will use “my training is in economics not management” as a crutch even after decades of managing people. They are so hyper-focused on their project work and do not care about their employees. Some of them have questionable morals and will play dead or shut you down when you raise serious concerns. The organization structure also makes it so that no one has to be responsible for anything that’s not project work, which creates a very dysfunctional work culture. - The rainmakers will bend over backwards to cater to clients’ unrealistic requests by making the team work nonstop (no evening or weekend plans for months). Those hours help VPs bring in tens of millions of revenue and yet the year-end bonus for juniors are insultingly low. - HR is worse than unhelpful. Take a look at the ratings by demographics on Glassdoor and notice how Asians (vs Whites) and Women (vs Men) have much lower average ratings. Again, this is not a functional workplace in terms of culture and general well-being