Pros
- The people are generally delightful. People are friendly & take the time to get to know you - Office is nice and in a great area of the city - They set you up with the tech/ergonomic setup that you need - They do have quite a few good frameworks for ways to do business processes (i.e. giving feedback, running a productive meeting) - They do a lot of unique things with the culture. Intro presentations to the company, and the onboarding process is much smoother than what I would have expected for a company in this stage. - Benefits are great.
Cons
My experience was a negative one. My department & adjacent departments had toxic pockets. I felt that joining IAI would help me take the next step in my career, and that turned out to be a mistake. - Some members of senior leadership would act in a way that I would describe as vindictive. Often raising their voice aggressively to a point where employees hesitate to participate. I became less vocal as time went on because I felt the value of my contributions was outweighed by the risk of being belittled in front of my peers. I will say that this is not across the entire organization, but if you were looking to join the organization I would recommend that you understand who the people are in your department and around you. - In my opinion the directions coming from senior management are muddled. Every initiative is introduced as if it is objectively the right decision. Often those initiatives are abandoned quickly, and/or are never heard from again. They celebrate the smallest baby step as if it were conquering Everest, and then you never hear about a project again. I understand that change is a portion of the various start-ups I have worked at, but the sharp pivots here made weeks and sometimes months of work totally worthless. This was a common occurrence for me. - A lot of back channels & what I would call an ‘inner circle’ exist. I have found this exists in a lot of start-ups, and it is alive & well here. Being asked by 5 different managers/executives about something to do with your co-worker or boss felt unsettling and unprofessional. - The company has not found a balance between culture & corporate. I appreciate a lot of the efforts to build culture in a company. However, you get whiplash when they want to do culture building activities, but then in my opinion put corporate over culture around some of the raised issues of toxic management (and when raised by the entirety of a department, not a portion). - I never felt valued as a member of my team. Some departments seemed to have a great cohesive culture which often made me feel like an outsider looking in. I felt as though I was there to carry out the wishes of my manager as a drone, and nothing else.