Working at Charles River Analytics in Cambridge, MA: 5 Employee Job Reviews by Real Employee working in Cambridge, MA Area

"Great culture all around and everyone was encouraged to be challenged."

"Bunch'a unprofessional jerks over here. They rescinded their offer 2 days before I was supposed to start. After I had already moved to Boston and found a tenant for the apartment I just moved out of. The VP is kind of a jerk, and so is the CEO. They're scared of change. Some nice researchers and HR folks, though."

"I worked at CRA as an intern. The pay was great for an intern, and I was even allowed to work from home three days of the week. CRA is full of very smart people working on hard problems, and it shows in the breadth and depth of the projects that they work on. It's a shame I had to leave the area, otherwise I'd still be working there!"

"Charles River Analytics is good place to start out as a college intern."

What do you like about working at Charles River Analytics?

"Charles River Analytics gave me an opportunity to grow my Java experience. I started out as a temporary employee to work on the Java Native Interface. This allowed me to utilized my experience in C++ and bridged it with my knowledge of Java. Later on, I worked on various projects not only to grow my Java experience (e.g., Swing and J2SE) but learned about other tools such as Bayesian Network and Agent software."

Do you have any tips for others interviewing with this company?

"For students who are still attending colleges, they could apply for internship at Charles River Analytics during the three months summer or some other time. For people who are seeking for positions as a researcher, they will have to prepare to give a technical seminar during the interview. Charles River Analytics is mainly interested in people who have expertise in AI or CHI. For experienced developers who are mainly interested in software development, the career can be very short at Charles River Analytics."

What don't you like about working at Charles River Analytics?

"A majority of professional people at Charles River Analytics are very young. They are like in their 20's. They naturally socialize with people of their age group. Or they might not socialize at all other than doing the work in the office. So, I felt alienated mainly because of my age as a late baby boomer."

What suggestions do you have for management?

"There wasn't a good management structure. When I started at Charles River Analytics, everybody in a division had the same supervisor. But the person whom I worked for was really my scientist who got contract awards based on his proposals. Then, they changed the management structure to base on a simple hierarchy of scientist-developer pairs oversighted by a division manager. But the performance evaluation sheet asked the employee to compare himself or herself with the so-called peer who were never on your project team. This is perhaps the most confusing bit of self evaluation."