Pros
* There are some great individuals in the company who are a pleasure to work with and who can and will take the effort to work closely with people to help them learn and develop. My friends that I've met at Detica/BAE remain some of the best friends, despite them having left the organisation. * There are some really interesting projects that can motivate you to get out of bed in the morning. * If you are on the right project, with the right management, they can be flexible with regards to home working and skewing your working hours earlier / later in the day.
Cons
* The remuneration is well behind market rate, especially when considering specific and niche skills. As a consequence it is near impossible to recruit for some roles and graduates are used to fill the gap. BAE thus acts as an incubator for other organisations by bringing graduates, spending a lot of time and effort training them, and watching them walk away for a 40% uptick in salary after 2 years. * Performance Management is atrocious. There is an annual review that is rushed (because it aligns with year end and Christmas). This is simplistic, and then fed into the void, where three months later a number comes out and you find out if you were promoted, what your salary increase is, and if you've got a bonus (spoiler alert: you probably haven't). * Senior Management have no presence, and communicate almost exclusively via 'blog posts' on the intranet. These are normally vacuous and contain no real content other than a "Thank you for working hard, please carry on". * If you aren't on a good project with good management, you can easily work 80+ hours a week indefinitely to try and keep a project afloat, for no thanks and no material impact on your annual review. * The company is attempting to transition to a products organisation rather than a consultancy. The emphasis is on being 'market-led', which would be fine, were it not for being taken literally by managers that don't understand their markets well enough to challenge what the customers say or identify a root issue. Thus they prescribe a solution that they want that excludes the opportunity to innovate and be 'market-leading', and also that when presented to end-users, doesn't meet the intended goals.