Company has changed from being a really clever off-the-wall consultancy into a company with some standard products to trot out to every potential client.
Company used to boast about their near 100% retention - staff turnover is now very high.
Office perks (e.g. juice, fruit, kit kats) slowly being eroded bit by bit.
Company socials much less frequent than they used to be.
Uncompetitive salary.
Hours can be brutal - expectation to pull out all the stops to ensure project delivery makes for some long nights.
Security culture means everything is super locked down - e.g. don’t think about using Google Chrome as your browser!
Overall strategy is a bit confused. Used to be a lot of duplication across clients doing very similar work. Recently there has been more of a drive to cut the rework i.e. sell software licences over services, turning the business unit into more of a mix of a consultancy and a software house. Consultancy but without the time and resources to do bespoke projects. A software house but without the right product development and testing, training or high-quality developers.
Supposedly managed services are the way forward, but serious lack of knowledge on how to run these properly.
Lack of innovation - same tired ideas being trotted out for the last 10 years. Very little exploration of new technologies
Lack of understanding or desire to do agile development, or proper testing! - has led to a disgusting monolithic upgrade cycle for customers but also problems for consultants who don’t know anything about the new features, and need to be retrained
Volume of work often does not correspond to resources. You can be super stretched on project one minute and then on the bench for 4 months if there’s no work around.
Objective setting/line management used to be poor but has improved somewhat, but still feedback can be very infrequent, and review process is still very drawn out.
Business is generally quite complacent as more competition joins the SNA market
Hot desking not done well - people have desks for months at a time so it’s a weird crossover between hot desks and permanent desks - with the advantages of neither
Senior management not well known, not visible on the ground
