Pros
Acumen is a little bit of a mix between an academic environment and a corporate environment, that has to deal with a lot of government bureaucracy due to the nature of the work. Most of the employees are in their 20's, which includes a lot of managers. They come from good schools, a lot of undergrad math majors and masters in statistics, along with a handful of PhD's (economics, typically), although there's a wide variety of degrees. As such, you're going to be around a lot of smart, hard-working, young people. The company is (internally) fairly dynamic and fast-moving, with the restrictions to workflow generally coming from the government side of things. The nature of the work, I think, is more rewarding than both the typical SF Bay Area tech company and the typical university. You're going to be working on current federal health care data, helping to shape national policy. As opposed to working at a startup making yet another fitness app, or running predictions on what kinds of shoes a user is most likely to buy. Or working at a university, on 10 year old survey data of 3,000 people. It's something in the middle. The work hours are flexible, the culture is informal, and the work is challenging. The Burlingame office is right on the bay, great views, good for outdoor walks along the water.
Cons
The drawback of staffing a company with a lot of people who are fresh out of school is that there isn't a lot of outside work experience brought to the company. Most of the new employees have never known anything outside of the university, or a summer internship type experience. The result is that, while there is a lot of technical training, there isn't a lot of experience in working in a team environment towards a shared long-term goal (not typically learned in a university). Internal communication suffers as a consequence, which can result in unevenly distributed workloads, last-minute requests, duplication of work, version control problems, etc. The company is moving in the direction of being more mature and "integrated", but there is some distance to go. Pay and benefits are adequate for the location and typical experience level. But you don't go into public policy to get rich. Work-life balance is a function of the distribution of workload. If you're in the weeds having to fix old mistakes, it will be bad. But if things are going well, it's fine.
