Pros
Well paid if you receive the car allowance and stay long enough to benefit from the profit-sharing scheme, nice new office with river views (although Staines is Staines), excellent winter and summer all-expense paid conferences (skiing, free bars, free meals - these were great fun).
Cons
At the interview, I was promised a training package that would last a month, this was especially crucial for me as I had little background IT experience except with Matlab at university. On arriving this package turned out to be a few extremely vague, 10-year-old documents that I was expected to complete on my own. Although I was allowed to ask questions to other staff members, they were too busy to actually help me and occasionally there were not staff members available that had used the software or done the training themselves. One of the prerequisites for the Siebel training that I was given was along the lines of 'Experience using Siebel in a professional environment', making this training package virtually impossible to complete as someone who had never even heard of Siebel before applying for this role. There was never any assessment or training plan made; the whole thing just seemed very half hearted. After about 4 weeks I was put on to a project using a program for which the company provided no training whatsoever. The work quickly became very difficult and I found myself reaching out to colleagues for assistance. My project manager was extremely obstructive and unhelpful, and dissuaded me from asking questions to a point where it was impossible for me to advance at all. The line management structure of the company is totally ineffective at dealing with issues. My line manager was friendly but was based 5 hours away in northern England and had never been to my office in Staines. When I raised my issues with him and he spoke to my project manager, suddenly the reviews of my work from my project manager became extremely negative. I do feel that my line manager got a skewed perspective of the situation as he had never reviewed any of my work himself, or worked with me on a project, or even spoken to me in person. Instead I was told that it was annoying when junior people ask senior people questions. Important line management meetings need to be done face to face, not over the phone, to avoid the he said / she said situation that ensued. There just seemed to be no oversight of the training and development of graduates in the company at all, meaning that each graduate had a very different experience depending on to whom they were assigned and what project they were working on. Some graduates who started around the same time as me were even stuck for 5+ months doing the 'training' talked about above because no work was available for them. There is an expectation from some of the project managers that you will regularly work beyond your contracted hours. During the 7 months that I worked there approximately 20% of the staff resigned. My advice to a graduate that is considering joining like I did because it is well paid, despite not having an IT background, is to stay away. That said I gained good, credible work experience and developed some useful skills from this job.