Not a good engineering company
Pros
- Colleagues are really smart and generally there is a good work culture (work-life balance etc) - Work in some consultancy spaces (e.g. areas of gov) can be really interesting and rewarding in terms of the value you bring - Opportunity to get involved in wider areas of the dev lifecycle early - Consultancy work allows you to work on a variety of projects, which generally keeps things interesting (although tech stack rarely changes)
Cons
- Company values management over engineering, it's hard to progress past T4 (mid developer) without direct management experience, and even with this it's twice as hard for engineers to get promoted over general consultant roles like PMs - Salaries are quite low, especially given how expensive our charge out rates are. - Poor distribution of senior to junior members. Because of the high charge out rate the company generally throws loads of grads on things making it hard to maintain good standards, which I think they're starting to see strain over recent years - Company infrastructure is TERRIBLE, it lags nearly daily to the point you can't work, it's hard to get any permissions and generally a terrible experience to develop on - Very bureaucratic, hard to get promoted unless you know the right people (and pay rises are generally pretty poor without a promotion) - Hardly any opportunity to do anything that isn't paid by a client, so you're restricted on self-improvement and improving internal issues - Fix the terrible and largely undefined interview process for experience hires (I've seen so many experienced devs leave and hardly any be hired)
