Pros
The physics side of the business is full of very intelligent people who really care about the work they're doing, and this leads to some genuine innovation. By and large, there's a very friendly atmosphere around most things, and a stated aim for improvement. Willing to pay for remote staff to fly into the Massy office on a regular basis. From the technical perspective, several tech stacks are in use, with varying degrees of team buy-in. If you're keen to get stuck in there's a good opportunity to learn many things on the job, especially in the field of containerisation.
Cons
To put it bluntly, there's no evidence of a grand plan, just casting about in the dark and hoping that things'll work out. I can only talk as an employee of PASQAL UK, but they fail at the core fundamentals of employing staff. Late salary payment with no apology (due to administrative failure), uncertain holiday entitlements for public holidays, didn't check eligibility to work in the UK until 10 months in, expenses never actually reimbursed, the list goes on. "We're trying to do better" is a common refrain, with new leadership in HR thrown in at the deep end of a completely dysfunctional organisation but evidence is lacking at the sharp end that the eroding trust is worth trying to holding together. No "staff handbook" for the UK, so things like holiday policies have to be pieced together, and it's a common problem to have no idea who to ask about problems - to this day, still have no idea what the process would have been for time off due to illness. Staff social events regularly cancelled on short notice, which is very frustrating when scheduling international travel around them. Benefits are lacking, especially in comparison to French staff - pension is statutory minimum and there's none of the fluffy extras to make you feel like you're a valued part of the team. Zero support for neurodivergence-based issues. Irritating habit from all departments of signing emails off as "from X team", instead of from a human, which gives the impression of not wanting to stand by decisions being made. On a very slow drift from Slack to Teams, which is a point of daily contention across all company channels from the dogmatically against the latter. Salary transparency is non-existent. Notice period is weird - "one month with notice given at the end of the calendar month", which makes applying for next roles tricky. The cloud team is young skewing and fairly junior in experience, and is missing a layer of senior engineers to ensure that issues are well defined and protect from ill thought-out requirements from the commercial side of the business. There's also no real progression opportunity, and job titles are seemingly chosen at random on hire (and are randomly in English or French with no obvious logic). There's an increasing push for policies and documentation for technical staff, but it's slow, and it's not uncommon for decisions to be made and then never communicated. Uses OVH as the main cloud provider due to data harbouring concerns, which is the source of frequent challenges.
