Pros
- Reasonable salary. - Internal tech talks are common and often they bring in guest speakers. - Bankwest hosts lots of industry events, which makes it a convenient place to work if you're into that sort of thing. - The office is genuinely pretty nice place to work. Reasonably well equipped as far as comfortable working spaces, and the Microsoft Surface TVs are decent.
Cons
Bankwest is, unsurprisingly, a bank. It has many of the typical problems you would expect for a bank. Things move slowly - very slowly. Despite what Andy Weir might think, taking the popular Spotify "agile" model, sticking a shiny name on it, and making everyone in the company work in 2 week sprints, doesn't solve any of the deeply entrenched cultural and managerial issues that plague the company. Development teams at Bankwest are held hostage to middle managers and "product owners" who wouldn't know what tech debt was if it hit them in the face. Developers have no autonomy or control over their backlogs, and technology decisions are often made by architects that probably haven't written a line of code in about 5 years. "DevOps" at Bankwest basically means that build, deployment, and monitoring systems are now someone elses problem, leaving development teams with little to no ownership over their path to production. The "DevOps" team spends most of its time managing the VMs that make up the legacy TeamCity build system, and fighting management for budget to improve the monitoring and logging mess. Meanwhile, you still need to submit a ticket to the "infrastructure" team to get something as basic as a VM, and it could be weeks before it's ready. Bankwest is one of Perth's largest technology employers. My advice is that it's probably worth working here for a year just to get it on your CV and then move on. Don't expect to learn much, and certainly don't expect to make an impact.