Pros
Start every week off with a live show! If the CEO is in a "great" mood, he'll pick someone at random and berate them in front of the rest of the company for 30 minutes and remind the rest of the employees that "If you don't want to be here, don't be here." There will also be "special shows" periodically where the CEO will just jump onto an internal call and rip into a consultant for 15 minutes then leave the chat. Or, he will just rant about certain regional teams that are "lazy" on the general channel only to immediately delete everything after it gets posted as if nothing happened. Every pay day is like playing the lottery. Are you going to be paid on time today? Who knows!? Finance clearly doesn't either and will blame the bank for not processing the funds fast enough, or that they are currently experiencing "cash flow issues". Just hope that you have enough saved up to cover any bill payments of your own because it can take up to 3 weeks to see your pay sometimes. The CEO is a real "tech wizard"! He can't be bothered to schedule calls with key individuals on a project. Instead, he will use Zoom's call feature on the group chat causing everyone to stop what they are doing to join this call. These groups consists of 10+ employees, while only 2 or 3 are actually needed. Everyone there needs to be able to see into the future. The CEO expects everyone to "forecast" how many hours you will plan to do for a client not just for the following week, but for four weeks out because as consultants, we should know if something big is coming down the pipeline and it's not the Project Manager's responsibility to allocate the hours for us. But the CEO expects that you have at least 40 hours forecasted each and every week. There's constant engagement with the CEO. He will reach out to you almost daily to see how many billable hours you've completed so far, and how many more hours you should be able to achieve by the end of the week. If you are on track to hit your billable target (of 32 hours), he'll ask you to try and increase it by 20%. Just be sure that your actual hours do not fall short of your forecasted hours, otherwise you'll be the random person mentioned in point 1 soon. Learn to work "smarter" because you'll be told on day one that your target hour is 30 for a consultant and 20 for a business analyst, only to have that increased to 40+ for all roles. Learn to milk clients for all their money by "The man" himself by scheduling a minimum of three hourly calls a week and throwing as many consultants into this call and bill accordingly. This, according to the CEO is to show that we "care" about the client('s money). Improve your creative writing skills because the CEO expects you to write an essay for each time entry. His reasoning is that if you write enough, the client will not read the entry and just blindly accept what's on the invoice and pay it. Learn negotiation skills as it will be vital when clients end up disputing their invoices and the number of billable hours that they are being charged. You will be expected to defend and justify your hours Figure out what to do with your spare time as clients stop working with us due to the cost of business. Increase your typing skills because the CEO says that "time entry should only take 15 minutes to complete each week", while expecting paragraphs of text. You will get to meet a lot of new people at this company because of the constant hiring and firing/resignations going on. You will meet someone for a week and by the next week, they've already moved onto somewhere else. Learn to put the company's needs before your own as the CEO will take a prospective client's requirements, sit on it for 3 months, realize that a demo needs to be presented after the weekend and he'll expect everyone to work over the weekend to get a demo working. Be told that the company is going to experience a huge grown by April because Oracle will make a "huge push" to sell more products which means that NetDynamic will also get a piece of the pie, only to not get any leads during this time and results in the CEO firing all of the Project Managers and Delivery Leads because they don't bring in enough billable hours.
Cons
The consultants you work with are crazy smart, friendly and know their stuff.
