Pros
Salary is reasonable for the Bay Area. Free lunch four days a week, and it's not bad. Diverse company with few "tech bros". Pretty good insurance and benefits package. Office is an easy walk from the SF Caltrain. Ample vacation time.
Cons
All the usual downsides of working in health insurance. Stop me if you've heard this story before: - Endless meetings that run in circles, in place of doing real work - Computer programs from the 80s that crash all the time - Meaningless speeches about "values" and "culture" from busybody managers - Hours spent preparing "plans" and "estimates" that management then ignores, or rewrites to fit their wishful thinking - Basic requests go through layers of red tape and get held up for weeks - Promotions given to friends and talking heads (and the founder's wife), not hard workers - Noisy, overcrowded office with no quiet space or privacy - Leadership takes no responsibility, will never admit a mistake, or even that a problem exists However, unlike Kaiser, this company loses money hand-over-fist. If there's a slowdown in start-up mania any time in the next five years, Collective Health will go straight to bankruptcy court, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Positive reviews are mostly from the customer service reps. They're paid way more than reps elsewhere, which is great until you realize that you can't lose money on each customer and make it up on volume. Fortunately, they're all hired straight out of college so they won't think about details like that.
