LRW Reviews

Pay is not competitive until you become an account manager. I was an SRM when I decided to leave LRW. When I started interviewing with other companies I was offered on average about 15% more than I was making at LRW just to make a lateral move. I ended up getting offered even more than that to move over to a client side position. Very little work/life balance. It's true that the work ebbs and flows but on my team it was made clear that people are expected to work a minimum of 10 hours a day. In the times when you actually have a regular 40 hour work week, there is a lot of pressure to help out other teams who have a busier load and a lot of guilt tripping that happens to people who try to protect their time. Management is a disaster from middle management all the way up to the very top. The main benefit to working at LRW is that you can get promoted quickly, especially at the more junior levels and this creates all sorts of problems. LRW will promote people to middle management for a bunch of reasons, but actually knowing how to manage people and run a team is almost never one of them. Someone can be a good research manager, so they are good at checking tables, programming surveys, writing q'res, etc but they might not have any clue how to manage a team or develop people under them. If upper management is worried they are going to leave, they'll get a promotion to SRM, which is middle management. This happens ALL the time. So they get promoted to a position they aren't prepared for, and to make matters worse now the position that they were filling and doing a good job at is now filled by someone new who probably also doesn't know what they're doing. The end result is teams comprised of people at the lower levels who don't know what they're doing and people in management who don't have the skills to develop them or teach them how to do their job. This causes an unending stream of mistakes on projects and LRW's solution to this problem is to just brute force things by throwing man-hours at problems to try to fix them. Not more people, just more hours with the same people. This is why people quit. I saw another recent review here saying you shouldn't believe the negative reviews because these are from people who wanted to quit anyways and are therefor "outliers". Negative response bias on review sites is definitely a thing but presumably that same dynamic effects the reviews for other companies here on Glassdoor as well. How do LRW's reviews compare to other companies here on Glassdoor? The truth is that LRW is a revolving door, people are constantly leaving. They aren't outliers, they are just more likely to leave reviews on a site like this. The team referenced in that review, like the rest of the company, has experienced a fair amount of turnover recently. I know several SRM or higher people on this team who are well liked by the company but who either left their job in the last several months or are actively looking for a new job because they are/were miserable. On the plus side, the people I know who left got way better jobs and are currently making a lot more money! Me too!

Work here if you have no other option and/or you have a starving family that you must feed (although an RA would not make enough to feed a family and his/herself). This place should be your absolute last resort is my point. There is some serious problem with basic human code here. There are so many people that are just so mean for no reason, and it is very difficult to work with team members that are rude and impolite for no reason at all. Upper management is completely clueless in giving any sort of direction, or actually providing any sort of guidance to a new employee. There is particular tension among the female managers. They treat junior FEMALE employees like they are lower (in terms of class - not a hierarchy at a job) than them for no reason other than the fact that they are jealous of younger, more attractive counterparts. The environment is like the movie Mean Girls, where there are cliques and lots of gossip (especially in the tracking department). The "senior research managers" are ego monsters that will shout at you and put you down any chance they get. It is scary how easy it is for this company to fire people for no reason at all. I personally know a few people that were fired because of "performance issues" but realistically it was because their managers were just incapable of getting along with other normal humans and not sarcastic, evil, gossipers like themselves. I have personally witnessed countless times comments made regarding people's sexual orientation, religion, and race in a mocking tone. If you're not a straight, white male, you probably will feel extremely excluded here. There are no efforts to make ethnic minorities feel a part of the company that is nearly entirely made up of white folks. The hours are crazy. If you don't mind working 12-13 hour days and loads of weekends, this will be a great match for you. Expect to say bye to cooking meals, exercising, seeing friends, or even getting a good night's rest to keep you going the next day if you choose to work here.