Career Stagnation, Poor Compensation and a Bad Reputation
Pros
Work/Life balance is excellent, Full time employees will bill 40 hours a week to their clients but rarely work more than 30. Expectations of employees are so low, the smallest amount of extra effort makes an employee appear as a rock star.
Cons
Cons randomly ordered below: 1. Pay is 30% below the northwest industry norm. 2. Employees will routinely be pitched for projects beneath their skills sets or to projects far outside their areas of expertise. While there is a "defined" career path to build skills, management routinely under-values the potential of their in-house talent and rarely promotes employees. This is in large part due to the high level of turnover the company experiences with it's employees. 3. Promotions are common in terms of added responsibility and title change; however, it's extremely difficult to get a raise greater than 1% during review time unless you come with an outside offer in hand threatening to leave the company (in which case you could be lucky enough to receive of up to 7%) 4. Benefits are mediocre there are no added perks. 5. The sales force is disorganized and unprofessional. They are unable to maintain critical client relationships and force their delivery staff to over-deliver to ensure that PO's stay open, SOW are written, etc. 6. Leadership fails to appropriately delegate critical internal business function roles to their senior leadership. This lack of authority causes an extremely fragmented experience for employees which largely depends on which management resources they have access to. 7. The internal prospective of iSoftstone is that of a high tier consulting firm, but externally they are viewed as a lower middle tier "body shop" similar to a VMC or CompuCom. They have a reputation among other consulting firms as a place where undesirable employees go for the shelter of low expectations. 8. If you start working for iSoftStone prepare to buy your own computer. You will recieve a complimentary laptop as a "perk" of course, but due to the overall stingy nature of the company these are typically 3-4 years old an unable to drive some of the most basic functionality of windows 8. If you are staffed at Microsoft, prepare to be laughed at due to the monstrous size and overall low quality of your machine. For emphasis, the experience is similar to being told you'll be provided a free corporate phone only to find out you'll be receiving a brick from the 1980s that doubles as a paper weight. 9. High Turnover - turnover is currently so high at isoftstone (Q1-2014) that the company has had to discontinue employee departure announcements. I speculate this is to avoid causing a panic and creating a mass exodus situation (which i personally believe is already in progress). 10. Market forces appear to be destroying the company's niche. Microsoft no longer appears to be interested in a middle tier professional services type of company, instead preferring a low cost/high value offering (eg TCS) or a high cost/high quality offering (Big 5). This middle tier approach means that isoftstone has a mixed resource pool of really high quality talent that is under paid and really lousy talent that is over paid. 11. Honestly i think isoftstone is a sinking ship. I'll be shocked if they're still a company in 6 months.
