Nielsen reviews

Ok, let me make it as brief as I can: 1. Outsourcing galore. You WILL lose your job sooner or later. Nearly everyone I ever worked with at Nielsen has either been laid off or has left the company of their own accord. 2. At the time I left the company, pay raises were not being given, even though the company fully admitted they were doing better financially than most other companies. 3. No work life balance. Management will tell you there are 7 business days per week, and this includes nights, weekends, holidays AND VACATION. Most people find themselves working 7 days a week trying to meet the unrealistic deadlines promised to customers. Guess what? The delivery date is not met, and is pushed back. So all of that hard work was for nothing. Rinse & Repeat for the next big project, and the next one, and the next one. One person is asked to do the workload of 2 or 3, which also means that you are so deeply entrenched in your role that there is no opportunity to do anything new. In other words, lack of career opportunities, unless you want to be a "lead" which basically means at Nielsen that you are doing the work of a manager, but without the title and pay of an actual manager. The Indian contractors do the hands-on work, and the American workers who are left are being forced into the "lead" roles. 4. Employee morale is horribly low. Expect to get yelled at by certain managers on a regular basis. 5. Lousy pay. I left my "Senior" level position at Nielsen for a Junior level position (to work with much more marketable technologies) at a different company and did not even take a pay cut. What's that tell you?

Frat-house management techniques--for example: my first week there, the VP noticed i left my computer on my desk over night, so to "teach [me] a lesson," he hid my computer so I'd think it was stolen. When I complained to HR, they just said, "that's the way he is!" Benefits are terrible--They only match 1/2 of your 401k contribution which vests after 3 years. Health insurance has a $1000 deductible. This makes it impossible to work here if you have kids or ever plan on retiring. Pay is also on the low end. Highly political atmosphere. Because they hire an army of young people, supervisors do not critically evaluate performance. Instead they rely on superficial traits and biased feedback from directors. I never really had the chance to work with people who were really experienced and knew a lot about the industry. All the people I interacted with were young folks hired out of college with no real-world experience. Way too much outsourcing. I almost think then next move will be to hire IRI to do their analytics! And the worst part of the job: you have to work with clients who don't give a damned what your reports say.