Unless you really need the job, I would avoid working here. Some of the many cons:
- All of the usual enterprise systems you have to use at a consultancy are very inefficient and hard to use, even just claiming travel costs back if you have to go to a different office is a nightmare
- Everything for HR or IT support seems to be based in India. After I had my laptop reset after coming off a project, it took me 6 weeks to get IntelliJ installed on the laptop again because I didn't have admin rights to download and install it. I kept asking for support or Self Service repo where I could get it, and I just kept being told to raise tickets which led nowhere. After I started getting quite argumentative in the tickets, they finally had someone contact me on Teams and it was sorted in a few minutes
- Communication is very poor when trying to reach out to people outside your project. I had a query about my payslip, so emailed and DM'd people from Payroll multiple times. And they every single message, I never got an answer
- As soon as you come off a project, an internal countdown begins for you to find a new project and if you don't find one, you will be made redundant. This happened to me and several others, some of which hadn't been told that the project we were expecting to join had fallen through. At one point they even told us they had upcoming project work, but that we might need to be laid off and hired back when the project starts
- When doing internal interviews, trying to get people to answer you to set up a meeting for an interview is a nightmare. Even though I'm in London and was being interviewed for jobs in London, the interviewers all seemed to be in India. They would sometimes message me to ask me to join a call, and when I did, they didn't join the call and instead said they were busy and couldn't join. So why ask me in the first place?
- Also the interviews are so poorly done. I had multiple programming tests where I was asked to close my IDE and instead write Java in MS Word or Notepad. When I couldn't remember specific syntax or libraries, and asked if I could use Google, they said no and gave the impression that this should all be memorised. One woman even asked me how I would write a prompt for generative AI to debug and issue, so I wrote the prompt and she said "No, that's wrong. That won't work". First of all, how do you know whether an AI would be correct or not. Second, the whole job of software engineering is narrowing down problems and figuring things out, of course it might not be immediately correct, but you iterate on the problem and figure it out
- After internal interviews, unless you passed the interview, the people you were dealing with go completely radio silent. You ask for feedback or follows and they don't even acknowledge your message
- The only person who wasn't directly involved with my project that I was able to get responses from, was the HR representative who oversaw the process of laying me off
