Important to understand the consequences of the business model
Pros
The benefits (health insurance, etc) are, or at least were, legitimately good. It's an employee-owned company, which at least has the potential to be cool, although see below. They navigated the early pandemic pretty well. I gather that's changed. Good transparency about basic business performance.
Cons
It's important to understand CRA's business model (they're an SBIR mill), and the consequences it has: - Everyone works on 3-6 projects at once, most projects are 6-18 months, most are small. - Everyone's attention is shattered, there's no focus (either individually or institutionally). You're not going to get the collaborative energy of everyone pulling in the same direction. - There's never enough time to do anything well. - The most successful model is extremely incremental re-skinning of prior work; it's not fair to say that voluminous BS artistry is valued over clarity, integrity, or deep innovation...but it's certainly a key skill to get ahead. - The reality of research funding in this country means that you'll be forced to work on military projects sooner or later, whether you're comfortable with that or not. Not all of their work is military, but probably 95% of it is. - Government contracting requirements makes for bureaucratic friction such as hourly time tracking and paranoid IT practices. There are probably some good managers there, but there are definitely several terrible ones. There's little accountability for the bad ones. Mine never took any interest in my projects or goals, never taught me anything or gave me any meaningful support. You can tell a lot about a company by their onboarding. My onboarding was like the old Woody Allen joke: it was terrible, and there wasn't enough of it. Really, shockingly bad. The pay is below average. CRA isn't very flexible in their institutional categorization: you're in one group, one division, and one role. Cross-group and cross-division collaboration is explicitly, politically, and structurally discouraged, so if your interests lie between the defined groups or divisions, expect resistance and turf wars. Similarly, CRA divides their technical staff into "scientists" and "software engineers". Scientists' job is to bring in grant money by writing proposals; they also manage projects, write reports, manage subcontractors. Software engineers have to implement whatever the scientist proposed. It's sometimes possible for a software engineer to try to shape what they work on by contributing to proposals, but it's pretty much extracurricular and won't be supported or rewarded--performance evaluation doesn't have the flexibility for people who want a hybrid role. There seemed to be a lot of company politics that was pretty opaque to me, but it definitely didn't feel like a place where one could challenge the status quo, push for change, or bring diverse perspectives. It's only a place you can develop your own research program if what you want to do aligns very very closely with what's already going on there. Otherwise, there's not much support and it's lonely. There are a couple top layers of lifers, and a bunch of exploited junior scientists/engineers. It's employee-owned, which sounds great, but it's not set up to benefit you, it's set up to benefit the lifers. It takes a long time to vest, it's very hierarchical, they'll keep putting barriers up for meaningful advancement. They'll get a couple good years of work out of you, and then you'll get disillusioned/frustrated and leave before you have meaningful equity or profit sharing. Culturally, It's pretty old school and a bit soulless. You won't find either startup energy or big tech company perks here. Reply-all email chains, not Slack.
