Pros
The work life balance is extremely good with fully remote working, and I have never found myself working more than contracted hours. It's very rare to see people online super late. Company really cares about your wellbeing and happiness. There's a lot of schemes to help if you are struggling with mental health, and most in the company completely understand if you are struggling with personal issues. Great progress in increasing diversity in tech. A real drive to get more women involved into tech positions, as well as minorities. Pay is very good especially for a graduate position. It's the best in Glasgow by far.
Cons
They've been hiring loads of graduates over the last couple of years, and it seems that teams just aren't prepared for them whatsoever. There is very little opportunities to get involved in real engaging software development work, and it's very easy to find yourself in a team where your role is the complete opposite of what you're looking for. It's very easy to feel like you've been forgotten, and have little to no work to actually do. Combined with full remote working, the experience is very poor for a new graduate who is keen to get thrown into the deep end, and get stuck in and learn. Most graduates were placed into random teams which did very little software engineering, and/or have been in a cycle of being told to do Pluralsight training for months on end. It seems the opportunities to progress in the company in the short to medium term as a graduate are extremely limited. At the end of the graduate scheme, 'graduate' simply gets removed from your contract and you continue working as you were. Promotions to AVP seem extremely limited and hard to come by, and the route to get there seems long winded and just not worth the hassle. If you are a keen hands on software engineer looking to learn a lot quickly, I would not recommend Barclays - despite the money being very good. It's far too easy to stagnate technically, and/or learn the complete wrong tech skills which the industry generally looks for.