Pros
Glasgow office staff try very hard to keep the office fun. Nice gym and nice canteen.
Cons
Where to start.......? Hardware is obsolete. PC was under spec'd and 4 years old when I joined. Servers were 10+ years old. Software developers need decent spec'd PC's. Time is money and when your PC can take 30+ seconds to display Outlook due to only having 2Gb of memory (2010!!) and using 4Gb of swap... well.... Software quality is non-existent Only manual testing performed by un-trained over worked team who know little about software they are testing. No automated testing to speak of. No unit tests. 1 manual test cycle per release. Any issues found are brushed over. Most code is not tested. Monthly releases done between 11pm and 7am Friday night to Saturday morning. Release dates can change and in 20 months working there I had two holidays cancelled due to changing dates without recompense. (lost hotels, concert tickets). When I complained I got told "perhaps investment banking is not for you" Staff totally over stretched. Very bright people are producing terrible software due to lack of continual personal development and absolutely no peer review system. Many of the engineers don't understand source control. Code is regularly copied around. Most engineers don't understand md5sum's, diff, patch etc. No code reviews whatsoever. Literally anything could be put into the code base. Think Superman III and Richard Pryor's half penny scam etc. Simply unacceptable in a place working with so much money. Lots of paperwork filling and box ticking - Understandable if the processes we're doing the paperwork for work. Pointless if they don't. Regularly people don't know what they are doing or the area they are working in and so lie / make things up so as not to look bad in front of management. Results in countless hours / days wasted each month with people having to double check things as you simply can't trust what anyone outwith your immediate team says. Interview process was dreadful. Many applicants had no proper competency testing and their applications were fast tracked because of their previous employment history and not their actual skills.