Pros
It's a household name and looks good on a resume. If you don't live on one of the coasts, the comp isn't too bad. You can see how mediocre research is conducted (it's not wrong, or un-credible, just not sophisticated or often meaninful). McGraw benefits are quite good.
Cons
It's almost a sweatshop, with virtually all top-down communication. Very focused on support departments who essentially rule everything, especially finance. Horrible company systems and beaurocracy (McGraw) exacerbated by JDPA put unnecessary barriers into place that suck the life out of efforts to get real work done. Reorganization and reductions have choked productivity (though the cost reductions look good momentarily). Over focus on effeciency, made worse by putting non-researchers in critical research management roles, means that products are slipping, and certainly don't meet the lip service to product excellance. The support department dominance means that we do many things that are customer unfriendly, but that make life nice for the support areas. Ironic for a customer service rating company. A huge number of processes have been pushed to business units with poor, complex systems that don't make them more effecient. If you work with clients, you basically have to do everything yourself, from travel booking to expenses, to revenue projections, etc while being expected to turn out 30%+ per year increases. All the systems are on-line so you are hampered by connectivity and shut down when traveling. JDPA arrogance, combined with a police mentality about protecting the brand via centeralize support departments means they are choking the life out of the development of a foremerly vibrant culture and product set. Because McGraw didn't ride herd on S&P (a McGraw Company) during the run up to the economic collapse, they now have a big time police/legal mentality about all sorts of things JDPA does, that aren't meaningful and worse destroy the value we could bring to clients. Senior management is largely from the auto world and doesn't understand non-auto companies or service business issues. Senior management is also remote and thinks that communicating from the stage at "town halls" and hiding behind scripted video responses to associates' posed and edited questions substitutes for meaningful dialogue and involvement. Senior positions are almost always filled in the shadows with someone from McGraw. There's really not an open meritocracy, and you can get away with thrashing an business area to death to be promoted and leave a smoking ruin behind. The company is not good at rooting out bad managers at any level, and they allown know problem "children" to remain in place and cause damage year after year -- especially if they can sell stuff, regardless of the overall cost. McGraw's excessive demands for revenue coupled with O'Neill's childish need to make a splash as a new president are killing this company. This is a company in decline -- but it doesn't realize it because they've been able to get decent growth for a while by squeezing it dry. If they suddenly couldn't issue awards, the company would collapse. When the job market loosens up -- look out JDPA!
