Pros
- ED&I, almost got a community for everyone and support them, if you're into that, personally think it's gone too far. - Pay and pay increases, massively helped by the union. - Job security, could easily become a life-r there and disappear into the furniture. - Training resources, lots of internal training available and access to other resources such as Udemy. - Supportive management. - Benefits, especially if you are a parent or planning on being one, a lot of the benefits benefit those that are in management positions (i.e. age etc) but most are accessible to all. - Mostly nice people to work with, those that are not stick out and most feel the same way about them. - Remote working is supported and management are happy to have informal and formal working arrangements without much pushback, likely due to having a big workforce.
Cons
- Management and their personal assistants aka scrum masters are propped up by an Agile manifesto that is mostly buzzwords and creates more work for people doing engineering work. - Communication within the company is awful, likely a result of the company being too big. Takes ages to find the right person to talk to and can even then result in having to talk with 3 people or more to understand the full picture. - Career progression within your role is almost non-existent, people are given the choose to either: wait for an internal job role to come up (look yourself), apply, go through an interview process, or apply to another company. This system is baffling, forcing knowledgeable and experienced employees to leave their current area of expertise or leave altogether just to get a pay rise, after ticking all their boxes e.g. objectives. - Project management is mostly awful or non-existent, unrealistic deadlines, never based on previous projects, more projects are started on top of delayed projects, no roadmaps, no detail or understanding of what deliverables are expected for each milestone. - Process is so rigid that it talks forever to try any new ways of working and get buy in from other to try it, as you are then held to account for not following process. A lot of engineers have become numb to problem solving because of this and takes a lot of effort for them to imagine a world without the constructs of the existing process (which is not efficient). - Pot luck who your team is and if there's useless people or ones that aren't enjoyable to work with then suck it up or move yourself. Management are too nice to do anything significant on these matters.
