There is a kind of person that succeeds at this job; most get what they can and move on
Pros
- Learn very quickly about different disease areas - You can transition to manage teams and projects relatively quickly - People are sharp and smart. - The personal day policy is the best perk.
Cons
- Putnam doesn’t really know what it wants to be and the employees suffer for it: you can’t do big firm projects with boutique capabilities. This mismatch is dealt with by early stage employees that have to make up for the lack of resources (why do you have people with PhDs spamming doctors through email blasts to take an online survey? Aren’t their brains worth more?) but still expected to deliver as if all the resources are there. This has become a problem as we are doing bigger and bigger projects. This leads to feelings of under/overutilization and burnout at lower levels. - Speaking of burnout, because the firm is utilizing resources at “110%” (by their metrics) it comes at the expense of those that have to stay in the office and QC that 100+ slide deck after 3 days of working 15hrs to make sure everything we do is “bulletproof”. It’s simple, they cant do it. The managers get nervous when there is any error, no matter how banal, lose trust in their perpetually exhausted employee that is now dealing with feeling incompetent because no one has the time to balance positive feedback and constructive criticism. - This is also compounded by the fact that there really is no onboarding, so new hires have to crowdsource their training from managers and team mates. Managers are under tight deadlines constantly and have no time to teach employees how to do their job, leading to more errors, greater frustration on both ends, and surprise poor performance reviews. - Building on that, you can’t say you “care about the sustainability of this job” but really it’s as long as employees learn how to always be working. I’ve seen people get anxious when they can’t check their email over the weekend because they know their manager is emailing them. I’ve experienced first hand employees get +80hr weeks after they disclose to a manager or HR that they are going through a family crisis/medical emergency. Only to then get poor performance reviews because they didn’t perform as if nothing was happening in their “life”. If you give someone a bad performance review because “their head wasn’t in it” and you know life changing event X happened Y weeks ago... that reflects poorly on your ability to see your employee as a human and support their needs, not their skills to do their job. - Middle management goes by unchecked because of lack of upward feedback culture. Even if people voice their dissatisfaction, it really doesn’t matter. Don’t say it does. It doesn’t. - There is a set type that succeeds in this company. Diversity of thought, while said to be encouraged, does not feel welcome. You need people with a healthy sense of disrespect for how things are done, that’s how you keep improving.
