Pros
- High compensation relative to nearby tech companies. - Pockets of highly intelligent and talented people.
Cons
As others have posted, this is Navient. Earnest's culture and mission are gone now. It has become clear that even with the new "CEO" Susan, the grip of Navient has gotten tighter for she does not have the autonomy we had hoped Her administration, the executive leaders (directors of engineering, product, operations, people, etc. ), appears to have a strong influence on her and it is very clear amongst employees that the executive leadership team does not have Earnest's employees in their best interest. The source of discontent results from the hierarchy at Earnest. First, the executives are not invested in their team; consequently, the lack of vision, transparency, trust, guidance, mentorship, and accountability is apparent. We can see they're just here until their next big payout. Without a doubt, they have fair reasons to be unhappy as there is still bad blood from the executives stemming from the handling of the acquisition by the founder Louis Beryl. These people were promised the rewards of any hopeful, young startup but did not get it post-acquisition (i.e. equity going to 0). Instead, Navient offered retention bonuses that could not be passed up. The negativity energy and distrust towards Navient, consequently, trickle down to us (the individual contributors), affecting everything core to a happy, stable, and prosperous career at Earnest. Their solution to maintain Earnest's day to day operations is to flush out negative ICs by replacing with new people, promoting internal "yes men" to senior leade roles, and offering retention bonuses (i.e. LTIP). The executives will turn a blind eye to most affecting the happiness of Earnest employees (e.g. converting those from salaried to hourly, eliminating unlimited), but dissent or attitude will not be tolerated by them. As bitter as this may sound, does anyone fault Susan and her executives? Far from it, these people have reasons to not be invested in Earnest's success but this has created a dangerous cycle of unhappy executives and unhappy employees since our success depends on one another. Finally, I believe the intent of Navient is to retain the Earnest brand and customer reputation for their own marketing purposes. All roles in SF, in the future, will be closed either by role elimination or reallocating to SLC.