Argos reviews

I have worked here for over 10 years and it used to be a good place to work, the last 3-4 years things have just gone downhill. I work in IT and there has been a steady move to outsource more and more of our work to an Indian company called Infosys. The IT director keeps on stating how good a job they do, what he doesn't see is the bad quality work come back and how much effort we have to put in to get it to work. It would be quicker and better if we did this work in house in the first instance. Probably because of the no blame culture there is a total reluctance of management to accept responsibility for when things go wrong. On more than one occasion and most memorably at the IS conference a very senior manager said of RACO (a large project that has gone badly wrong) "We are where we are". That is a phrase used all too regularly by management, the irony that this phrase wouldn't pass the Turing Test is no doubt lost on them. I can't see this situation improving any time soon so I shall be joining the rapidly growing ranks who are leaving the department, it's a shame really I used to enjoy working here and there is still a real sense of camaraderie amongst the people who do the work.

There are so many downsides, I worked in Information Systems and spent the last few months of my time at Argos with the theme to Benny Hill constantly looping around in my head. The cause of this was the frantic running around of managers who had little or no technical background making decisions by committee and ignoring the advice of their technical people. The division I worked in was Argos Direct, they would consistently fail to deliver projects properly because of the ‘unique’ strategy they would follow. They had no comprehension of standard industry practice and only seemed concerned with playing political games to further their own careers. There were far too many layers of management, in terms of full time employees, the last project I was on there was 9 managers on a project for 2 technical people. All this just to implement an off the shelf software package – pathetic! Some of the managers, despite them being native English speaking were semi literate and would send out e-mails which were simply incomprehensible. I watched in absolute horror as one junior manager climbed the greasy pole to the dizzy heights of middle manager. He convinced the IT director there was a need for a new role within the department, then he applied for and was given the job. All this in a department that is crippled with a management hierarchy that in fights to protect their own position. I have never worked for a company with so many layers of management. I have also never worked for such an unproductive organisation, I suspect there is a correlation there. I was criticised twice by management, in an official manner, for only working the hours I was paid to do.