Good lord, I do not even know where to begin.
Let's start with red flags for you to notice when you're interviewing there:
1. Notice the dead look in everyone's eyes. No, you're not imagining it- in my opinion they ARE dead inside because working 60+ hour weeks/nights/weekends is a regular, every-week occurrence at RA. Multiple people have even gotten divorced because of the hours from what I've been told.
2. Notice the demographics of the office. If you look at the women, you'll discover that it seems like they only hire young, skinny, attractive women. There are only two women in the company over 40 by my count, who have both been there for years.
"Wait a minute!" you'll say. "What about the men? Maybe this company is just exceptionally svelt and attractive and young [more on that last part below]!" Well my friends, you can rest easy knowing that in my estimation the men are not required to fit the same standard.
Leadership is almost completely lacking diversity. There are larger diversity problems at the company.
3. Speaking of young people, their general practice seems to be to scoop up young inexperienced kids right out of college, flash them more money than they know what to do with, and fling them into this relentless environment of toil, because they don't know any better. This is coupled with:
4. A culture of weird cult-like hero-worship. Once a month they get together in a ceremony I began to colloquially refer to as the "Financials and Bootlicking Ceremony." Here we get a financial overview, which is cool, but not as uncommon in every company I've worked for as they'd like to sell you on. Then, we spend time praising the company and Our Wonderful Leaders because RA Is The Best Company On Earth and RA Hires The Smartest People. In my opinion, their products are shoddily made (more on that later), the people aren't mystical MENSA mutants (every company says that), and most people are pretty miserable in their day-to-day.
5. In my opinion, their hiring practices involve hiring generalists with no measurable expertise in any skillset to fill highly technical and skillset-requiring roles. People who have never coded (or at best, never coded in the languages they're asked to) are tasked with coding complicated software. I'm not joking, even a little bit. This results in horribly buggy products and angry clients- who yell at Strategy at-will. Similarly, generalists with no skills are tasked with doing what would be product and QA roles. Imagine 3 inexperienced folks with maybe some decent calculus skills all trying to plan what a project should be, coming to you with requirements nilly-willy and unorganized, changing the requirements constantly, and also everything is high priority and due now. This is fundamentally the way that RA is structured and senior leadership thinks wholeheartedly that it is Good, and should not change.
6. Back to culty stuff. They have this set of values you'll get ground into your bones called SERIF- mostly HR nonsense but let's focus on the F - FUN! - as an example of how clueless leadership is to what actually happens in their own building. Here's what Fun means at RA - "Well, you're already staying until 7 every night anyway, why don't we watch a movie together at the office from 6-8pm?" Fun events like this help you stay away from your family, refrain from enjoying your life, and avoid the hassle of forging bonds outside of work. But hey man, free beer in the office!!! The F in SERIF lets them avoid any responsibility for making meaningful change around the reasons people are completely miserable at this company.
7. They might throw out their AJC Best Workplaces award- keep in mind, most of the people who voted on this have literally never worked anywhere else. They are painfully ignorant of what a healthy work environment should look like. It is my opinion that this is probably intentional.
8. Oh, your first week you will get to meet all of senior leadership and if you don't lick their boots clean enough, you might get reprimanded.
RA is a great place to work if you'd like to waste your 20s away so that some CEOs and two rich kids can get richer. Stay far, far away from this place.