Pros
- Good employee benefits: Free Internet, Free TV, Free Telephone - Good Graduate Salary: 31k+ with bonuses and stock options - Good Training Opportunities and Certifications: Cisco CCNA and many others - If you get into the right team and get the right type of work, it can be pretty rewarding.
Cons
- Non-technical staff in technical roles or making technical decisions with little understanding. - Poor Performance Management / Employee Grading (this decides salary and bonus). - Doesn't take software development seriously enough even though they are effectively a tech company. - Managers (and other senior staff) change roles frequently for promotions or new roles. After they move, they are effectively no longer held accountable for the previous decisions they made or anything they worked on, even if it costs the business money. - Poor project management (hint: The Mythical Man Month was written in 1975, why are these mistakes still being made?) - Hiring Graduates for numbers (as many staff are retiring every year) into roles which are not clear cut or well defined. I've seen some graduates with computer science or engineering degrees put into project manager roles. - Rife with focus on business processes instead of getting things done, politics, bureaucracy, over complication: I work a set number of hours on a set project, why do I need to fill in a time sheet? - Increasing challenge to remove employees means a lack of resource: entire teams replaced with subcontractors while some people still remain in useless roles, monitoring useless data with little to no value for the business. - Empire Building: empire-building is demonstrated when individuals or small groups attempt to gain control over key projects and initiatives to maximize job security and promotability