Unfortunately, the disadvantages heavily outweigh the pros:
- Hands-off managers, with very little empathic or human skills. This made it a very unpleasant work environment - at least in the Paris office - with no sense of team or of belonging to a company. Rude/disrespectful attitude and comments by my direct superior.
- Virtually no HR. As I was based in the Paris office, and the one-person HR department in Boston was unaware of how our contracts worked, our legal rights, etc. I waited for 4 months before getting my insurance.
- Big divide between a lot of more senior staff and younger staff. Doesn't have the advantages of a start-up.
- Basically every other person is a VP of their 1 or 2 person department.
- Extremely foggy on communication, processes, and hierarchies despite the small size - no standardization of any client practices, disorganized strategies when facing clients, lack of communication and trust.
- WFH pre-Covid was technically allowed, but so strongly implicitly discouraged that you could never do it.
- Recruitment process was overly lengthy.
