Pros
- Good benefits: unlimited sick time, decent parental leave, good health insurance coverage (not as good dental but it's okay, just added a vision insurance option) - Great people - Extremely competent people - Good impact of work - Efforts to be involved in the local agile and tech community - Bimonthly all-hands meetings where you get insight about what's going on at the company and on other client accounts Excella has great benefits which often get taken for granted but are extremely appreciated by the people who benefit most from them. It's great to be a part of the Excella community, which comprises some of the best people I have ever had the pleasure to work with, and in turn, with the community at large in DC and Northern Virginia. Excella's employees work to create a welcoming environment at the company and in the community and are often seen giving talks at conferences and local meetups. It also feels good knowing that our work makes a real, measurable, positive impact for our clients. This is a great place for people early in their careers in tech or who are escaping a toxic workplace in search of some of the things I mentioned above.
Cons
- Toxic alcohol culture - Lip service to diversity (let alone inclusion) that is often mocked by the leadership member who talks about it - Performance is reviewed only once annually, which is the only time promotions and compensation are discussed - Poor feedback cycle upward to supervisors or management - Poor feedback for poor performers - HR extremely un-agile in supporting careers - Promotion of unqualified consultants to leadership roles - Promotion of consultants to supervisor who should not be managing their direct reports - All-hands meeting is now less transparent than in the past, due to feedback that this information was boring? Bottom line - Excella used to care deeply about its culture when it was a much smaller company. It was part of the reason I loved the company so much when I first joined, because this was truly evident. Having doubled in size, and with more and more new faces every month, there are very few people who even remember what that positive culture was like at this company. It is very alarming that so many people have been leaving last year, both newer employees who have been here for fewer than 2 years and more tenured consultants who have been around for over a decade. The big shuffles in leadership have also affected confidence in the firm as a whole. Excella is still full of competent people but it is time to stop claiming that the culture is a priority; we were left out of the Best Places to Work list this year and that is not a fluke. Excella was called out for its failures in diversity & inclusion a while ago, and the response to that was extremely lackluster. If anything, it became a joke to be "politically correct" and people of color were often involved in these jokes as being "proof" that there was no real diversity problem. What's frustrating is that I know that underrepresented groups are valued at Excella, but they're not well-represented at the leadership level. When leadership is running through talking points about diversity and then cracks an inappropriate joke at the end, it not only defeats the purpose of giving the talk but undermines it by making cultural sensitivity and diversity a punchline. Many of the recent negative reviews touch on points I wholeheartedly agree with (not least of all that many employees do not agree with taking on certain clients), so I would only add that Excella really needs to examine its culture around drinking. The large company functions often result in copious stories about coworkers who got sloppy, and many people can reliably count on specific colleagues to drink to excess at the events. What's most surprising to me is that, while Excella's young workforce is large and growing, a lot of the stories come from senior colleagues and leadership. I often got the impression that these leadership members only drank this excessively here... at a work event. Not only is it generally unhealthy to have binge drinking at work events that then get discussed ad nauseum the Monday after and in the years to come, but it was very alienating for colleagues who did not drink.
