Pros
- Boots-on-the-ground staff are absolutely fantastic, with a real sense of camaraderie amongst engineers & support staff.
- Good day-to-day perks (free tea/coffee & other amenities).
- A strong sense of general appreciation on an engineer level from customers, with customers sometimes feeling like colleagues.
- Fairly flexible working location once trust has been established.
- Line managers listen to concerns around the business structure (and try their best to action things).
Cons
- Far too much focus on new business, to the detriment of maintaining existing contracts. This is the company's biggest downfall. Once business is in, they don't seem to care about keeping it.
- Unrealistic delivery timelines to customers. The consulting team works to the best of their capacity, but can only deliver quick solutions that have key elements (i.e., access for engineers to troubleshoot issues) missing or misconfigured, due to them being incredibly busy.
- The company over-promises to customers, then leaves reactive support teams to deliver on those promises - no matter how unrealistic the request.
- Issues that are raised almost never make it far up the chain, and do not get actioned.
- Teams are designed to be in direct competition with each other - leading to a non-collaborative & toxic working environment.
- Everything is left to the reactive teams to sort, with the attitude being 'Just sort it for the customer'.
- No time is allocated for training, yet solutions introduce new technologies that teams are expected to support.
- Promises of career advancement are false, with promotions only going to those favoured ('jobs for the boys').
- The job title means very little - with 2nd-line engineers being involved with projects & consulting-level requests.
- As a result of the above point, pay is far below that at which is expected for work being carried-out.