Toxic culture and playing politics, major fundamental issues with the company
Pros
1. Decent recognition from industry making the transition pretty easy. Honestly, take what you can learn from here and get into industry ASAP 2. Staff level people were very collaborative, smart, and hardworking. It just pains me to see how some of them are mistreated by MT and LT and those that don't 'fit in' are unfortunately axed and reprimanded for their job
Cons
I intentionally held off writing this review to give myself some headspace after leaving the company. Needless to say, my experience is mostly focused on working in Trinity's NY office 1. Most LT/MT have favorites and there is a culture of perfectionism. If your suggestions aren't aligned with MT/LT, and/or make mistakes and are disliked by an old timer, you will not get promoted. MT will see any challenges to their authority as 'uncooperativeness' or 'unreceptive to feedback.' This unfortunately creates a culture where staff member's have to hold back their input to any project work and discourages collaboration. 2. Staffing is incredibly inconsistent within and across pods. You will have teammates who are swimming in free time/on the bench for weeks, constantly pinging that they have ST time, vs other teammates are swamped and can't catch a breath. There is no camaraderie as Partners will be incredibly resistant to put their own pod members for cross pod staffing as they are too concerned about their own P&L. Timesheets apparently don't mean anything even if you're clocking 60-70 hour work weeks and still get staffed on projects, while other teammates who have bandwidth and put themselves available for project work are just simply ignored and left on the bench. 3. I found in general MT/LT are incredibly resistant and unreceptive to feedback. Feedback in the NY office goes heavily top down, whilst feedback from project members to MT/LT are simply ignored or not taken into consideration. Whenever something goes wrong with a project, MT/LT places blame on staff members without truly reflecting on their own contributions (or lack of) to the project. What's the whole point of having '360 reviews' if in the end all the blame ends up with the staff? 4. Work at Trinity is honestly very misleading and not 'strategic' at all. You will be doing mostly primary/secondary market research (~80% your work) vs true strategy projects. Don't expect to learn any forecasting, valuation, transaction, BD type work, as MT will play favorites and disregard your staffing considerations for the tiny amount of these projects that they sell. There is a project passport for you to develop holistically but I feel like that never really gets followed as I've heard instances where staff members are constantly getting staffed on repetitive PMR engagements. 5. Learning is not at all valued at the company as you are expected to perform at certain standards, but the company does not invest in any real training to their team members and you just have to learn by drinking down a hose of water. (e.g., don't staff people on forecasting projects if they haven't had the experience to build a model from scratch by themselves, don't expect a staff member to lead a PMR project if they never written a DG or conducted a KOL interview before) 6. Performance review are a complete joke. I've seen/heard MT nitpick bad reviews to only show to staff members, while the truth could be far from it (other reviews that praised their contributions were simply ignored). It honestly boils down MT playing favorites and if you fall within this mold, you will be rewarded and if not you will be forced to look for other opportunities. 7. Gossip culture is real in the Wall street office. I've heard countless examples of MT/LT gossip about staff members who would unknowingly hear through the grapevine from eavesdropping or other team members. This creates a very toxic culture for a lot of junior folks to be in, and it saddens me to see great team members getting debased by senior folks of the firm. I know its human nature to gossip, but please keep it to yourselves... 8. Scheduled/approved time off is not respected by managers, literally all 24 hours of every day are expected to be made available to work, rotating project teams mean no manager feels a responsibility to help you develop. If people are still working 12 hour work days while they are OOO, what's the whole point of being OOO? This needs to change as this culture of not disconnecting while OOO creates a fear for junior folks to do the same, adding more to this toxic pressure cooker culture 9. General woes associated with consulting - 60+ hour work weeks are the norm, always have an unbalanced power dynamic between client/vendor, artificial/unrealistic timelines are constantly created without consideration to staff bandwidth in order to stroke a client's ego. I went in knowing this won't be an easy job, but the above few points really make don't make it at all a collaborative, learning-focused, and sustainable work environment to envision a long term career here.
