Data Science & Corporate - The worst of both worlds. - Data Scientist Signal Group Employee Review

No work-life balance. Leaving at 8 hours was unheard of. Most of the time work spilled over to the weekends (all unpaid of course). Extremely high turnover rate. It is common for employees to stay with the company for under 1 year. Employees were regularly abused by management and frequently pushed to their limits. Culture seemed to be inherited from a highly corporate environment. Employee evaluations 2 times a year – rarely were employees given positive feedback and this was only achievable through politics not through actual performance. Often the relationship with other employees was highly competitive. This has nothing to do with the employees themselves, but the culture of the company. Employees were often set up to fail by being given impossibly hard tasks and fired based on “lack of performance”. Other times the tasks were very vague and you were judged on your “lack of initiative” (even in junior levels). The job description and the interview process were misleading over the actual nature of the work. They made it seem like they were looking for a data scientist, while they were actually looking for a software engineer that often did manual data entry tasks. A lot of the products of the company are based on what was referred to as “human-in-the-loop” (i.e. people manually “correcting” the predictions of the ML models). A lot of emphases was given on this and not so much on actually improving the models.