Vantaggi
1. The young people of the organisation rekindle my faith in what is possible - they are misled, manipulated and underpaid, but that's another story that I will cover in the cons. The research associates, the field staff, the people who work with data are top-notch, talented people. 2. IFMR is well known - I have rarely had to explain where I work whenever I sat for job interviews. 3. If you have a manager that cares about your learning, you will learn a lot. I had a manager who was a little like this (not always, sometimes) but a quasi-manager/ colleague really pushed me to do things out of my comfort zone. It was fruitful and I am grateful to him.
Svantaggi
1. Arrogance of the upper management: The upper management is made of two people who constantly try to poke into the affairs of every project at inconvenient times. Think of a project where the data has been collected and a person gives you feedback that you "should have captured this aspect as well" - why didn't you give this feedback during the design stage? We are always told by upper management that they are busy so they cannot be fully involved in something - great - stop vetoing then. You don't have the context (of the field or the literature) I don't think you should have a right to stop any output. 2. Lack of training: Ask any researcher in the organisation where they really learnt things and they will tell you they learnt skills on the field or back in their master's programme or through the help of a colleague. Organisational support for upskilling: zilch. When you reach out they tell you some learning modules are on the horizon. I left before these learning modules could see the light of the day but after asking my RA friends, I learnt that they had modules on leadership and communication and not on methods of analysis, how to come up with a hypothesis, how to design a research project etc. I had once asked for some meagre 2000 rupees to attend a seminar on econometrics and they refused. Can you imagine? Can you imagine how callous and insensitive this is? The 2k that I had to spend out of my own pocket left such a bitter taste, it reflected in my attitude and my lack of enthusiasm for months. It was just 2k dude. I was not being wasteful. I was looking for learning that you couldn't provide. Can you do a cost-benefit analysis of your callous attitude towards learning? You are losing dozens of employees every year because of this. 3. Blatant and unfair pay discrimination: As a Senior RA I earned less than some RAs. One of the RAs was a very kind and generous person who let me know how much he earned. When I took it up with my managers, they told me it is not professional to discuss salaries. Can you please come out of your delusions? Do you think people follow these silly rules? Some of your projects are on information asymmetry and you're actively working to maintain it?