Pros
SEI’s small (physical) office and staff contributes to its close-knit, collaborative but dynamic work culture, with most employees spending lots of time outside the office in addition to the regular hours behind desks. Everyone who works there, from HR to program managers to interns, meets as a whole at least once a week to share their progress on projects as well as some kind of personal anecdote, which makes it so that everyone in the office knows and is invested in each other and their success. The staff, which definitely tends to be on the younger side, also shares the same progressive, activist, liberal values that are characteristic of the Bay Area, creating a certain camaraderie as well. Everyone at SEI takes on a large workload, usually voluntarily, but always manages to pull together and get things done effectively and on time in the end. Even the higher-ups at SEI are very approachable, intelligent and driven to do good work that makes a difference to the world, which makes it a great place to be!
Cons
The physically small office space often makes it hard to work independently for long periods of time (which could be a pro depending on how you see it) and there’s almost constant rotation between desks and offices and conference rooms depending on availability at the time, which can sometimes take you out of a productive flow. Probably given that SEI falls on the lower end of monetary compensation (which is to be expected since it is a non profit), there doesnt seem to be a lot of long-term retention of employees which can lead to some chaos and confusion & less work getting done during these transition periods. Though the flexibility with responsibilities for different staff members does lend itself to much collaboration, there can sometimes be too many cooks with the potential to spoil the broth at times. The staff is also not very diverse which is something to be considered.