Good and bad about Avanade; what stage in your career should you spend at Avanade?
Pros
The best reason to work for Avanade is that you may work with many highly skilled individuals. Working with the skill set at Avanade helps you develop your own skills, both soft and technical. As Avanade is a consulting company, you are exposed to many other organizations as well; ranging from terrible to great. That is an important aspect of your job; you essentially get a 2:1 experience ratio because you are exposed to so many corporate cultures, and ways of doing things. You also obtain experience from working in extremely large organizations (top 50) and smaller medium sized organizations, as well as different industries. If you are in the first quarter or so of you career Avanade is an optimal place to start. You may come to Avanade and learn a great deal about Microsoft specific technologies, but depending on where you are placed as a consultant you may gain experience in other areas as well. This is the place where you primarily go to amass experience.
Cons
The single technology stack myopia is becoming more and more a problem as the company grows and as the world turns ever more towards open source technologies. There are two issues with this: * High paid consultants are usually engaged in the strategic parts of IT. Those decisions have already been made by the time Avanade is engaged, since the strategic answers from Avanade are preloaded with Microsoft. This is a problem because it makes Avanade more of a body shop rather than high end consulting (which is where their pricing is at). * Direct versus Accenture provided business. Avanade receives almost all of its business from Accenture. In the direct business model they fail for the reason outlined above. This is a problem because without its own business to offset the risk of a single buyer, Accenture, Avanade job security may suffer. Also the compensation/review and evaluation mechanism at Avanade is heavily geared toward self-promotion and political plays. These elements tend to reward the wrong people and are therefore counter productive to the organization as a whole as well as the individuals that do not make politicking and self promotion their prime objective above all else. This is likely not the place for you if you are mid-way trough your career or later. If you want to be compensated and appreciated for experience, skills (including non Microsoft), while having a work life balance, and kids, look elsewhere. Realistically, at Avanade you may be expected to push Microsoft solutions even where they are not a good fit, resulting in uncompensated overtime, conflict and stress with the customer.
