Pros
A fair amount of flexibility that's increasing, but not perfect. Honestly most of my "pros" are actually positives resultant of the specific culture of the Berkeley office. I've met and spoken to Kumsal - she's amazing. I hope she gets a chance to really make important change at the company. The fact that Elsevier has not tried to squash our somewhat rebellious, rabble rousing, and out right disregard for "authority" culture is, okay, pretty amazing. (I am betting they were not expecting to acquire a rebellious teenager of an office, but hey, we're Berkeley-ians, it's in our blood.) You'll certainly see this in the Cons section below.
Cons
Where to begin... Salary: Elsevier has decided that consultants should make below living wage for the SF Bay Area. It's a fact, we all make under $60k (Majority being in the $48k range.) The AMI for "Low Income" is under 62k. The AMI for Very Low Income is under $54k. We can't plan for the future, invest in retirement funds, grow families, go on vacations, etc, because we can barely pay rent - if we can even do that! Fun fact: some of us have had stents where we were homeless for periods of time because we couldn't find housing on our salaries. Why yes, we are angry, salty, and underpaid, thank you for noticing. Meanwhile, we keep getting more and more responsibilities piled on us. Consultants are expected to be: Product Managers, Front end Web developers proficient in HTML / CSS, XML, some Perl, Back end Developers fixing bugs, Retention specialists calling up all of those ATL staff members at institutions making sure everyone is happppy, customer service reps doing day to day requests from a list of up to 20 clients, QA Testers because we're always finding broken things that should have never made it to production, and more! Comparatively, for our responsibilities and skill sets, our starting wage should be about 72k for the SF Bay Area. Just saying. "But why don't you move? With all of the FlexWorx options you can be remote!" - Good question: expecting us to completely dislodge from our social, cultural bases and support networks because we are not paid living wages is not an acceptable solution. Some of us are Bay Area natives, some of us work better in the office, whatever the case, repeat it with me: It. Is. Not. An. Acceptable. Solution. Gradual Reduction of Benefits: So this is new as of October. It was announced that our PTO benefits are being consolidated under a single system where everyone gets a set amount of "days" per year. It was all wrapped up in very positive language and sounded nice! Until we did the math. The new PTO system will reduce our PTO by 5 days on average. "But wait! There's a response saying this isn't so!?" Well, this is based on an average. The 5 days come directly from what was the Sick time plan. People with super human immune systems, or do not know that it is valid to take mental health days to prevent burnout, who take less than 5 sick days a year will end up even or gaining days. However, the rest of us poor sub-humans who do get sick, who do take mental health days so we stay productive, happy, human beings, end up losing days if we took 5 or more sick days per year. The fact this was very covertly slipped on by is really shady. No one asked for this. No One. Career opportunities: Funding for new positions is non-existent. Dev is understaffed, and Consulting Services is losing a war of attrition because there's consultants who have been there for 5, 6, even 7 years who can't go anywhere because the only options are be a manager, or hope and pray for a senior consultant position that fits your interests / skill sets.
