Pros
- All but a handful of the colleagues I directly worked with are genuinely smart and kind people. - The DC office is beautiful and has an incredible office services staff. Offices have catered lunch three days a week plus snacks, both based on employee input. - At least on my team, there was no pressure to go into the office. - Upon employee request, the company sponsored a DC office kickball league.
Cons
- As of my departure, none of the custom research process at MC directly integrated AI, making MC’s custom function indistinguishable from traditional market research firms. MC positioning itself as an AI company is laughable when custom research is the main revenue-generating arm of the company. - MC’s sampling process inherently introduces fraud that, short of a junior colleague spending hours upon hours manually cleaning, will be delivered to clients. - Especially in my last year at MC, hiring of new employees was much more miss than hit, especially at senior levels. MC is clearly not screening for relevant custom market research experience, instead looking for employees from specific but not always relevant backgrounds and companies (once Ipsos/Kantar but currently EAB, which is not even a market research company). Underperforming employees are not held accountable, resulting in junior and mid level employees bearing the burden of their incompetence. Instead of using PIPs, MC waits for underperforming employees to realize the job is not for them, which can take far too long if it happens at all. - Account managers are constantly selling work that MC simply has no infrastructure to service. Accounts that at other companies would have a dedicated full-time staff are instead being held together by the pure ingenuity of junior colleagues who keep the parts greased, all while having several other accounts to hold together. When I spoke up about no one on the research team having time to service new work for one of the particularly high dollar clients, I was ignored because the account manager was chasing their bonus. - “Unlimited PTO” is unlimited until you end up on leadership's list of people who took too much time off. - By my final months, I was regularly working 50+ hour weeks with no light at the end of the tunnel. My team leads were empathetic but could not quickly offer meaningful solutions to my workload. In the words of leadership, “this is not a 9-5 job.”