Pros
- 35 Hour Weeks, and early finishes on Fridays at 12PM. Makes a great experience for Gym, Shopping, etc as you have quiet times to go. Thursdays often feeling like you have concurred the bulk of the week. Extending the weekend.
- There are many events at the office that occur, with many communities, there are also many group chats about anything informal. You can easily make some friends or a community of people.
- Big Employer outside of London, you get a recognised name, while being able to commute and drive to the office. Bristol is also very nice town.
- Travel to many destinations (with generous expense policy), you can use airport lounges, eat out at your choice of restaurants for dinner, lunch, Expense snacks and drinks as you please, etc.
- Very nice offices, each with their own piece of engineering history. Some connected to Airports, some with their own runways. As Airbus sites work together, you often get to travel for business reasons and see them all.
- People are generally passionate at Airbus, and you can feel the buzz working in the office. This makes you proud to be there.
Cons
- Salary is not great, and bandings very limited. This job will not make you rich, but enough to live day by day. The promotions are very hard to come-by, and you will need endless working appetite, few years of tenure, and manager backing. The company generally does not want to expand budgets for roles, so they keep you in the smallest band and make it as hard as they can for you to get promoted.
- Once you reach a senior band, it becomes very hard to go higher, if you are early in your career, expect 10+ years of tenure to reach a manager band and average pay once achieved.
- Managers often are given positions because of tenure and not expertise. For example HR can move to Technical IT management commanding senior developers and architects. There is a clear lack of expertise with many managers, and therefore a lot of clueless managers operating large departments.
- You will work with people in a range of countries daily. Generally it can feel a tricky dynamic working in this environment with some unfriendliness in some circumstances based solely on culture/location.
- The company relies heavily on contractors, if you join with ambition to create a better future yourself, often times this dream will not happen, as most likely you will be governing and reporting on the work of other external organising doing the work. Therefore if you have a passion for what you want to do, this would not be the place. If you enjoy high-level, email and documentation you will love it.
- 3 Days a week in the office, which requires you to 'book' your work from home days in advanced and throughly tracked. No exceptions to the policy. This requires you to move close to the office to work here, as commuting may be too much for this frequency.
