Avantages
Good place to learn the environmental side of M&A. If you show initiative and ability you will be given more difficult work. Senior staff are generally great teachers and extremely knowledgeable. The people (even most of the senior managers) are great to be around. There is probably not a single bad-hearted person at GaiaTech.
Inconvénients
Senior management apparently has limited business acumen. Hundreds of thousands are thrown away chasing ideas, and when the ideas don't pan out, more money is thrown at it. Too many generals and too few privates leads to constantly changing way of budget tracking, employee expectations, and methods of evaluation. Senior management expects junior staff to work harder and harder to make up for money blown on bad ideas. Staff turnover is high, so the company is frequently understaffed. Senior managers demand that employees work long hours because work cannot be turned away or cherry picked for only the most lucrative work. Several times a year it's "sorry guys, we've got a heavy load right now and need you step up." Typically the staff are already logging 50-60 hour weeks, but when these rushes come, you are expected to work around the clock. The work product obviously suffers. When it comes time for recompense, you would think they'd be glad to share some of the profits made by your hard work, but they drag their feet. Raises are few and far between, and small when they come--even for employees that are doing well. There are no annual cost of living adjustments. They justify not giving raises because they do typically give an annual bonus (you can expect a couple thousand if you meet their extremely difficult utilization goals), but the bonuses are neither tied to company profitability nor employee performance. They keep hiring new/additional senior managers, who arrive with big ideas that typically fall flat. The added senior people only serve to absorb profits that could have been passed on to the extremely hard working staff. The business plan appears to be: milk every employee for everything s/he is worth. If the employee quits, raise expectations for the remaining group and have them train up a new staff member. The benefits are ok at best. Three weeks vacation/year with no sick days and a low accumulation cap (on a whim, they recently decided to pay out any hours accumulated over 80, with no notice or discussion). The health insurance is also ok but very unspectacular. They are currently trying to sell the business to a larger firm. The most recent attempt failed, but another is on the horizon. Things will change, but change at GaiaTech tends to be to the detriment of the junior staff.