Pros
- Higher Pay than the average industry, but consulting in general offers higher pay. - Company attracts highly motivated, talented, intelligent people. - You could find a good career path if you have no limitations or preferences on lifestyle, you are able and willing to withstand the culture long term, you are lucky with the projects that you land on and the people who you're with genuinely cares for you, and your peers perform poorer than you did on paper. Elaborating on the last item, the company has an annual performance review to which it only has a finite amount of promotions and bonuses to give meaning it is not entirely based on performance nor performance ON PAPER (huge gap between the two sometimes unfortunately). In other words, even if the entire pool of employees performed equally at 120% that year, only a certain amount of those people will get rewarded and the rest will get a "good job, but better luck next time". - Good place to start your career to set the bar high for your expectation of working for corporations as a whole.
Cons
- Poor benefits: medical, retirement (have to work for some time before company starts matching and then amount is average), education/certifications (Capgemini makes it difficult to justify the cost to support you EVEN when it directly relates to your job). - People have good intentions, but the culture and company system forces employees to sometimes do terrible things to other internal employees. - Capgemini claims that employees are the company's biggest assets, but company actions reveals the opposite claim thus high turn over rate. - There is no work/life balance for the average employee. You will have to learn to adjust to a new life in a new location every other project (several months to a year+). Typical work week: wake up at 3am to take the first flight out to your customer site on Monday, work from 7am-7pm everyday, get home around midnight on Thursday from flying back, wake up early on Friday to work. Weekends are for catching up, completing week/month/quarter-end administrative tasks and prepping for the following week. Rinse, lather repeat and it doesn't get easier. Although not officially stated anywhere, this is the EXPECTATION, not considered going the extra yard. Going the extra yard would be to take the very limited time you have leftover from a demanding week to spend it doing things that would help the company image such as volunteer work as company ambassador, help with campus recruitment, etc. - Full transparency and feedback does not exist, even when the context is about your performance and career development. - Senior management has been quick to side with everyone but their own employees. Does not care or "have time" to get full story, leading senior management to make, sometimes critical, decisions based on insufficient information and possibly assumptions.