Vantaggi
The majority of the people I worked with at DAI are fantastic--interesting, smart, hardworking, kind. The work is interesting and sometimes impactful and you can get exposure to big development actors like USAID, which can be helpful for your resume. There may be opportunity for travel in some cases. Work/life balance and benefits vary widely across projects but in my experience was generally fine. My time at DAI did help progress my career and expanded my network. I heard from colleagues that mobility across projects or to and from headquarters was doable.
Svantaggi
There are a few major issues that made working at DAI quite challenging and led to employees feeling unsupported: 1. There is a total lack of transparency around salaries (and it seems very intentional). It seems that they use "proof of prior employment" as a thinly veiled request to see prior salary history and use that to determine salaries, rather than basing it on experience or market rates. As a private company it is deeply disappointing that they consistently underpay (pay is often similar to the nonprofit industry). 2. DAI has a serious, serious diversity problem (though I recognize this is true across the industry in general). There is some acknowledgement and "conversations" about this issue but no resources, guidance, or concrete steps to address it. At all levels of the US office/projects, it is mostly white employees, particularly in leadership positions. 3. The processes and systems on projects (and likely at the corporate office too from what I have seen) are rudimentary at best. There's no software, databases, or other systems for financial, project management, or MEL functions. Projects have to recreate these from scratch and rely on dozens of excel spreadsheets (literally) to manage finances in the hundreds of millions. The processes, policies, and lack of systems often border on kafkaesque. 4. Project and Home Office (HO) staff have vastly different benefits. For example, only HO/corporate staff can become vested in company stocks. This is not made clear at the time of application, onboarding, or after. The distinction between projects and corporate is not made clear in job descriptions. 5. Projects are at the mercy of HO's financial processes. Payments to subcontractors, vendors, consultants, etc. are consistently paid late due to inefficient, convoluted processes with no accountability for the operations or payments teams.