Pros
You’ll have the privilege of working with some truly passionate and motivated colleagues, a few of whom (more on that later) are decidedly experts in the field. The org is very remote work friendly with the option to come into the DC office. The benefits are overall pretty good and the office is closed the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. There is also a generous professional development benefit and you’ll be given plenty of opportunities to attend conferences and other industry events. Coworkers genuinely care about you as an individual.
Cons
Some of the more senior level folks talk like Kendall Roy with lots of references to “disruption” and “winning the win,” which, like Kendall, they use to obfuscate their surface level understanding of the industry. The annual raise increases are pretty poor. Your only hope of a decent raise is a promotion which you can forget about unless you are willing to completely sacrifice your personal life to meet their unrealistic standard for “going above and beyond.” This alone is enough to breed discontent, but you will also see people with less relevant experience hired to an open management position before an internal good performer is promoted to the same role or even reassigned to a lateral open acquisition. As a result, the turnover of junior staff is very high since their best shot at career advancement is to leave the organization. To be clear, I think this is less to do with mal intent from leaders and more to do with ignorance and a lack of appreciation for the amount of work that’s needed to complete the responsibilities and deliverables the organization expects of you. As a pan- technology trade organization, you will get pulled in multiple different directions and the workload can at times feel insurmountable. If you try to raise concerns, you will be heard out at best, but no solutions or change of course will be offered to you. With the high staff turnover, your workload will increase further, which makes the minuscule annual raises sting harder. The organization’s DEIJ efforts are undermined by some of the more toxic individuals in leadership, one of whom opposed putting pronouns in email signatures because they had concerns over branding guidelines/ brand consistency (???). It left a bad taste and it’s for this reason that I ultimately call my experience negative overall. Sadly the organization has lost some well respected individuals from within the industry over the last year and it remains to be seen if the recruiters will be able to find candidates of similar caliber to replace them.