Pros
Some quick context, and useful factual information regarding the options graduate scheme FD subcontract out as IT support/business support to various companies in the finance sector, with speciality in the Kdb database language, so you'll be put on client projects, interview with clients etc. They are probably most accurately described as a recruitment company, and a low budget one. Options Salary : 19k -> 21k in second year -> 26-30k after two years; I hear they have slightly increased the initial starting wage, or at least sometimes do, it may be worth asking for a couple thousand more. Placements : 10k(?) I think that would be less than minimum wage so it must be slightly higher. 39 Hours a week Payday is in the final week of the month. This is fairly important during notice. Holidays are 20 days a year, and on London Calender so gets fewer holidays than Northern Ireland in general. They have a huge 5k clawback if you leave in the first year, 2.5k if you leave anytime in the second. It is used, if not in installments, then by simply not paying any wages at all. They pay food/rent expenses if you are NOT in Newry which is the main headquarters. They do give accommodation/expenses in Newry if you are not local. Dresscode is suit and tie, except on client site then it's client rules, typically business casual. The couple of external exams they ask you to do have a clawback on expensing them of 18 months. Pros: Expenses if you get on client site are very generous. This means that really it should be possible for you to save the entire amount of your salary more or less, since you generally should not have other expenses. This means it would effectively be quite a bit higher salary you were elsewhere paying rent, food, albeit you'd have the choice of accommodation/roommates/client. The workforce is very young, they hire lots of graduates so are a 'top' graduate employer, and your immediate colleagues are usually quite friendly. At least in my case I liked the business a lot too, but I think that can be luck of the draw. There is also some private healthcare benefit, but I never had need to use it so don't know much about it. Pension is a company match up to 5%, I think. The wage increase after two years can be fairly respectable. Generally you'll operate under the clients rules, and will have relatively little dealings with First Derivatives in effect. Early on a senior manager may have a speech on this saying to keep your head down, make no trouble and that they generally don't want to hear anything about you. That's not really paraphrasing either, and whilst it might be a bit demoralising to new recruits, I'd actually agree. You'll very rapidly want to avoid every interaction with First Derivatives the company outside of your immediate client work that you can. You can get pretty good experience in the banking sector, although projects can vary, but that's the nature of consulting. If you are technical you tend to get the better roles. Senior employees tend to stick around somewhat longer compared to the graduates, so I assume they are treated better. For all the negatives I'm about to mention, it's still a foot in the door, and graduates everywhere tend to just have to grit their teeth for a year or two, before circumstances improve. If you have no other options, and no prospects of future options for the next six months, it could still work. This does not extend to placement students.
Cons
There are a lot, so I'll organise them into minor and major Minor They are increasingly moving more people and projects to Newry. The odds of getting expenses and travel is getting less and less likely, which is really a loss of the sole major benefit First Derivatives give. I won't elaborate much on Newry, I think other reviews demonstrate enough the office atmosphere and morale. If you are on a project in Newry there is very little point in staying because you will get so much more salary elsewhere, and those projects tend to be longer term so you'll be on them for the entire length of your stay. I should also say that they sometimes try to pull people to Newry even if they live in the client city, like if a person is from Dublin working on a Dublin project, and not in FD accommodation or expenses either. They are moving more people into Kdb, Kdb is limited in regards to future career options for the individual, and the contract is even more restrictive than usual for Kdb developers, with restrictions like do not do any work as a Kdb dev for 6 months post employment. Although I doubt they always try to enforce it, I do hear that people sometimes do get legal threats afterwards. Pay is probably amongst the lowest in the sector during the first two years. The post 2 year mark is an improvement, but you can still do better fairly easily, even starting from the lower second year salary. Attrition rate is enormous. I wouldn't say quite that 50% leave within two years, but within 2 years and 6 months, 60-70% probably do. If you come back to this point after reading the rest of this you might notice that most of the cons are for new starts or people during the first 2 years, so you might ask why people leave afterwards once pays gone up and they should be treated better. I can't really speak for everyone and I didn't stick around for the full two years but it's probably a combination of a few things, they can still get better salaries, for less hours with more holidays etc, using the increase in pay as a spring board, secondly First Derivatives isn't really a place with career development, thirdly the nature of the graduation scheme/release from the clawback means it's a end of era and people are generally inclined to treat it as freedom to move on with their lives after being chained to the company, who they've probably already grown to dislike. HR try to stop people using the names of clients on LinkedIn, not had much success though. There are a lot of little minor demands like this. There is far too much internal HR emails available publicly. Every employee shouldn't be able to see interview candidates actual CVs, not the FD carbon copies, or see HR openly insulting people coming for interview. I wouldn't recommend checking the various folders in the company email if you plan on staying any length of time and are at all moralistic. I can only assume no one reads them or is aware of the information in them, otherwise there is no way they'd be public. A lot of internal processes like weekly/monthly reports or updating internal CVs are completely pointless. Annual reviews happen to individuals seemingly randomly, and people are put on and taken off projects at HRs whim, often the actual team management aren't informed till the day the person is changing project. Mentor system is the same, it's basically greeting email every six months just to tick a box saying 'mentor updated' in your reports. Queries to HR can go either waiting for weeks on a response or be ignored entirely. They like to avoid putting anything in writing, to a harmful degree, this is, of course, so they have the flexibility to invent their own narrative and they make it painfully obvious that that is what they are doing. A great deal of negative glassdoor reviews were removed a while back, and there are others that appear faked, usually the ones praising HR, and to a lesser extent praising the training. Take those reviews with a larger than normal pinch of salt. When in accommodation you can generally expect something like the internet to be cut off because bills weren't paid or moving into houses with no oil. This is just carelessness, not vindictiveness like other actions so is less of a big deal. In some cases accommodation can be very far from the client. In one case a colleague claimed he was doing a three hour commute each way, and would refuse to go back if asked. That might have been a slight exaggeration but they left within a few months so maybe not, certainly I know of several cases where people were doing two hour commutes each way for months at a time, including myself, so its not that far out of the realms of possibility. Major The clawback is far in excess of any value of the training it's supposed to justify, and is used even if training doesn't happen. Training consists mainly of a few dozen internal multiple choices tests, and for the first couple of weeks a few classes from other grads reading from powerpoint slides, although they are usually cancelled. I can also confirm that the clawback does not reduce at all over the course of the year, that is to say, leaving 1 year and a day is as good as 1 year and 11 months. It is also still used regardless of whether the employee gets the initial training in Newry or not. Many individuals are sent out to client site within a few days or a couple of weeks of joining, not the 1-3 months training as advertised, and the clawback is still threatened and used. It is interpreted as a penalty for leaving, rather than any kind of recovery of training costs, that 'for training' is just an attempt to make it legal. Also I believe FD gets subsidies for X hours of classes scheduled, though as I mentioned a huge number of them are cancelled or whoever is taking it just doesn't show up. I don't doubt they are recorded as having been completed though. They force groups of new starts to work extra hours in Newry unpaid, after signing a document stating that they weren't kept beyond usual work hours. They do not actually do any work during this time as I understand or do very little, it is mainly to demonstrate power or 'dedication' I think. They do not try this on everyone, I was out on client site too quickly, but this is very unacceptable behaviour. The notice period is far too long for junior employees, and it's basically working as usual the entire time, with no actual handover of duties. The length is arguably a bigger handicap to leaving than the clawback because employers do not typically wait three months or more for junior employees. The contract in general is horribly unbalanced, like for example during the first probationary period (3-6 months) you must give three months notice, and in return First Derivatives must give one week, then one month past that. They may at some point in the future add a clause to allow them to withhold pay at will so just be wary of that. They withhold pay and do not pay final wages. If you dislike the place at the start, wait till you're leaving. For full context, I shall describe the events of my own notice period, in my case I left before the full two years were up, but fairly close to the end of them. I give notice to HR, they immediately started threatening the clawback. I pointed out I never got training, to which I got no response. Pay however was full for the first month, so I presumed it was being ignored, as would be reasonable. Later in the second month HR again started to threaten the clawback, and that they decided exit dates over immediate managers. I again queried if the clawback would be used, and got no response. Also because they generally don't pay final wages, they hadn't done so for others who had left before me on the same team, I asked outright if I would be paid for working during the final month, and again got no response. They then withheld pay for the second month with no warning. I asked why, and they claimed it was a general policy 'to protect their clients and deter people from leaving'. So obviously I walked out. And before you think that was an extreme resort, there are a few reasons this doesn't really work as a deterrent. One: it's generally not acceptable even from a decent employer, and if you allow it to go unpunished they'll continue to think it is, and try it on everyone. Do not let this kind of action slide, you don't have to walk out, though you probably should, but think of some kind of penalty. Two: First Derivatives very often do not pay final wages, and this is widely known by many employees. Usually it is limited to the final month though, and is not limited to those still on the options programme. The biggest deterrent they could have to people leaving without notice is the belief that they will be paid during for working it. They do not give any reason to believe this, and at the stage of withholding pay still had refused to respond to any mails regarding clawbacks. If you aren't going to get paid, it might as well be an earlier month. Three: Although it's a months wages, since you'll likely be going to a much higher wage, it's less of a big deal. It's more like two weeks of future wages, so less of a loss, and if you were expecting or thought there was a risk to losing the final months salary anyway, it's less again since you can start your new job earlier. Eventually they said they might pay some net amount, worded so they could pay any amount they liked, provided I were to sign a document removing all rights to any kind of claim whatsoever and not to tell anyone about it's existence. No one in the right mind would sign something like this on a company who just withheld pay, is known for docking pay for any excuse whatsoever and regularly threatens ex employees with legal action. If there is any doubt in regards this you can check past employment tribunals for further evidence of withholding pay for consecutive months on a experienced employee, where they had no excuse of the clawback, instead using the excuse of 'potentially being in breach of contract' and only paying the first time after he had complained to the business, and the second needing to go via the court. That particular court case was extremely detailed and enlightening, so I'd strongly recommend looking it up, it really revealed how petty First Derivatives could be, and really is very accurate to how they behave today. They literally tried to claim they were withholding pay for causing 'reputation damage' for telling the clients that they were withholding pay. It also confirmed that senior management including the CEO felt withholding pay was acceptable. Anyway this is as far as they moved, instead opting to invoke the clawback and refusing to pay any accumulated wages to that point, for two months consecutively, that is the full month worked and the start of the final month. Interesting for a few reasons, in that they must've thought withholding pay in the first place and paying less than minimum wage is legal, so the clause of no claims was presumably for something they'd try later, that emails I sent guaranteeing notice if paid were not binding, therefore nor are anything in their emails(emails are legally binding though, so don't worry on that point, provided they aren't overridden afterwards), and that they'd rather opt to massively increase the chance of a claim, and guarantee no notice rather than actually pay wages, which I might add if you knew the client charges per person you'd basically recover the wages within a few days. They afterwards claimed your colleagues had been reporting on you, but I find the claims very hard to believe, for a few reasons. They were claimed about statements to colleagues that would've happened after pay was withheld, during which time I'd only talked to about four people all of whom were intending to leave shortly, and knew how bad First Derivatives could be, and were being at the time. I hadn't said what they claimed, so I'm fairly certain they're just making the claims up. They also didn't name any threat I'd made to justify withholding pay in the first place, not of course that anyone intending to leave would give any kind of indication that they intended to leave prior to payday. For my part I'd been constantly asking about exit dates, stated I would be there for as long as required, my start date with next employer was after the full notice just in case, and I'd previously outright asked about pay in the last month. It's possible they interpreted that query about pay in the last month as a threat to leave if not given a guarantee of being paid, which I could see might've been implied. If you like, feel free to believe that your colleagues are reporting on you, AFTER pay is withheld. I very, very much doubt it though. That said I can't tell if it was HR making something up or possibly one of the managers. I did ask one of the managers and they said they had no knowledge of it, and didn't know HR were withholding pay at the time but it could've been one of the others. If it's HR fine, that's just what they do, but if it's a manager it's more problematic. Not only because it implies that nearly universally from the lowest level managers to the top of the company, people think that withholding pay, not paying wages and outright lying is ordinary behaviour. It would also very much colour management's constant complaints about people leaving without full notice. If they didn't know that before people weren't paid during it, they most certainly know now. Though I personally believe it's just HR inventing some excuse, I can't guarantee it. Not that it would matter, paying wages should be number one on a employers todo list and they should never withhold pay under any circumstance. For when you do look to leave, don't bother trying to be reasonable, I tried that and didn't have much success. Instead use as many of your holidays as you can as early as you can, including unaccrued holidays and possibly sick days. Formally you're not allowed to have any holidays during notice, but there is too big a risk of not getting paid, so use them anyway. Ask about clawbacks of any kind, not just the big one, so expenses, any kind of advance payment, pay in the final month, exit date, and if pay will be on the normal schedule as well. They won't respond but ask four or five separate times anyway, and try to get any response in writing. They will try to avoid writing anything down, so you will need to be blunt, refuse to 'talk' about it, ask them to write it down. If they do withhold wages, I'd recommend telling the business immediately, because it appears to be the only thing that actually works. I did not, instead giving FD the option to avoid embarrassment and that was a mistake. If you do not wish to tell the business, consider sending a delayed email that you can recall if they do actually pay wages or just head to the client office and tell them in person afterwards. I'd also recommend walking out, because HR probably won't respond otherwise. I didn't get any response until after I threatened then actually walked out, so if you don't they'll probably try to stretch out the time to keep you working and then not pay anything anyway. Also if HR do ask you to sign a similar document to the one they tried on me, I wouldn't recommend signing it, it's easier when you read it to see that it's so blatant they're going to try something, but you might consider editing it. I didn't think of that at the time though. If they do withhold and then pay wages without you having to resort to extreme measures, try to stay as long as you can stomach. If you do have to pull in the business then they'll likely try to withhold final pay, so try to get out as soon as possible. Eventually it might be realised that paying wages is a good idea. Just to elaborate slightly on the whole withholding pay as a general policy, originally I thought it would have to be false or limited to options graduates or something, after all they later had to make up an excuse, however talking with other recent ex employees they have been trying it on some, including post graduation employees so just be wary, and make sure you aren't relying on getting paid at all during notice even if you have done your full two years. Not that that shouldn't stop you leaving because you'll probably be going to such a vastly higher wage that you'll recover the difference in a couple of months anyway. And if you are thinking of leaving after a single month's notice, they've attempted legal action on others who've tried that. I unfortunately don't know the result, but be careful on that option too. If you are going to try that there is probably some sweet spot of notice to give between 1 and 2 months, where you will get paid, and leave the least chance and value of legal recourse. They didn't send out P45 either, though I'd put this down to incompetence rather than anything else. Also a minor warning, they delete your personal accounts and access within a few days, by far the fastest thing they've ever done, so just be sure to have downloaded and backed everything up early. On the work you'll be doing, I think it's fairly standard, has its ups and downs like anywhere else. The start will usually be the roughest part, where you'll be new to everything and can sometimes have little to no guidance. Other than that the only thing to mention is that because they are usually support roles, you'll very often be covering holidays, and weekend work. You do get this time in lieu though. I do hear some projects can be poor, particularly for non-technical staff, though any project, anywhere is probably better than the bench and Newry. I've skipped over a lot here, project work, team management, treatment of clients(not to their face of course, but aside from some questionable accounting on projects, there are way too many personal attacks on the business, with immediate colleagues you can let it slide, but for management its a bit much), and a lot other of claims I've just heard or can't confirm. I don't doubt other people have had and seen worse happen than I have. Try asking a current employee, or better an ex-employee about it before joining, particularly about projects for non-technical employees, or about treatment of new starts in Newry, or about what happens employees who try to leave, or even those who just put their CVs out on recruitment sites. First Derivatives relies heavily on graduates basically not knowing any better, or being worried about making a good impression or at least keeping the peace in their first job, just be aware of what you're joining.