Pros
- Most of the people that you get to work with are super hardworking and intelligent individuals that are all eager to learn, teach, and grow within the company. - Some managers are super awesome at not only teaching you how to be an excellent resource to the client but also great at mentoring (as long as your goals align with the company's) - A lot of support is available if you are proactive and ask for help. The company used Teams, so it was super easy to reach out to other employees all around the US for guidance, example documentation, contact info for vendors, etc.
Cons
- Work-life balance is essentially non-existent, which was okay at the beginning for me (straight out of school and eager to leave my mark in the world and hungry for knowledge). I was never one to shy away from working long hours (even skipping meals + going in on weekends) to meet our deadlines, but this became tough when it was a constant expectation. - Owners of the company would blur the lines between what was/wasn't appropriate (and I say this accepting that when I first joined the company, I naively misinterpreted their unprofessional actions as them trusting us/seeing us as equals). There was an instance where one of the owners asked an engineer to switch shirts in front of everyone at a company party which resulted in the employee and owner removing their respective shirts in front of everyone, leadership members thought it was funny and HR, who was also present, didn't say anything about the situation. - Living situation can be weird for travelers. During my time with the company, co-ed living was the expectation unless you wanted to figure out your own living arrangements, which was almost impossible for a recently hired engineer on the salary the company provided. Low level female or male engineers shouldn't have been expected to happily live in the same apartment as leadership. There was an obvious power dynamic that upper level management and HR failed to see. - Encouraged to lie about our age, experience, and additional projects we were working on. Most of us were recent college grads with no experience, but we were asked to include projects we "worked on" during training that made it seem like we had years of experience. This caused issues when a client found an engineer's LinkedIn page that showed her actual graduation year, so we were then asked to remove graduation years from our profiles and update our experience to reflect our fluffed up resume. The idea behind this is that we were just as competent as someone with years of experience since we had our whole company as a resource, which included people with 10+ years of experience. - Expected to travel with short notice, consistently unsure of where you will be placed for your next project (which honestly comes with the trade, but there were a couple of moments where my peers and I were told by the VPs we'd be going somewhere but then ended up somewhere different) - Pay inequality was super apparent when our team members began to feel comfortable disclosing their salaries. I've heard they've become better at raising people's salaries and hiring more people of color, which I truly appreciate as this wasn't the case when I worked there. Please negotiate your salary and come informed about what the position you are taking entails!! - Sick employees are still expected to show up to work and if you don't show up, you're still expected to put a detailed turnover plan for missing the day (even if it's just the day). When the pandemic hit, our clients wanted us to work remotely (which was super feasible as a lot of the work can be done anywhere there is internet access), however, the owners/upper management convinced the clients that we were super essential and NEEDED to be on site. The only benefit of us being on site was that the company was able to bill the client for the "travelers" being on site, but that left us and the clients unnecessarily exposed and at risk (as we were also encouraged to not disclose symptoms to the client if we had them). - Asked to do tasks outside of your job responsibilities. This included anywhere from furnishing corporate apartments, which is understandable. However, putting all of those items on our own credit card was tough when the company was not timely in reimbursing for the items (many of my coworkers had to pay off interest because it took over a month to get reimbursed). Sometimes the owners would ask Project Farma's employees to perform tasks for their respective restaurants/bars on client's time, which isn't truly professional in my opinion.
