Pros
There are a lot of opportunities for college hires in IT and a general "try anything once" and be rewarded attitude when it comes to the Agile Methodology. This attitude is slowly trickling up to the Malvern branch. The company is constantly polling crew and trying to gage general happiness at work and are responsive to results-i.e adopting work from home policy and supporting technology, and adopting a business casual dress code. Yearly bonus in which employees share in the success in the company is nice-it has been larger in the past by quite a bit-but as a college hire it is appreciate it. Not to mention there is still opportunity for year-end bonuses. This year, when the company reached a large milestone in terms of assets under management, every employee received a small bonus and a company gift. That was unexpected generous.
Cons
The company does a good job of bringing in IT talent but not utilizing their specific skill sets or valuing them in an effective that make the crew feel engaged and valued. College hire program is all about rotation which is great, but the program doesn't account for crew with specialized skills and their ability to contribute in this arena longer term. Crew can get frustrated and leave for jobs where these specialized IT skill sets can be directly utilized and better compensated. The support IT shops (testing, analysis, interface design, data) can also be undervalued in favor for java and Mid-tier developer roles. Many of these IT shops are under resourced and over-committed, generally viewed and treated as periphery to the development process and less valued in skill sets than developers. This is visible on the project team, manager, and upper-management levels. Company pushes that every college hire should aspire to management, again this is a fine goal for some, but recognition of the fact that people leadership is not the only measure or form of quality leadership is also important.