Good benefits but an archaic corporation not interested in improvement
Pros
- Good benefits. Your cash pay makes up only 80% of your overall pay, you get an extra 10% into your pension and 10% for benefits, if you don't use the latter in full you get the difference added to cash. Also got a 15% bonus last year which can be paid into pension. - Generous maternity pay - 6 months full pay, 3 months SMP, last 3 months phased return to work at 100% of pay - Good opportunities for flexible working - compressed hours, annualised hours, 9 day fortnight, etc are all well documented and available to request. - Job feels secure. - You learn a lot in an enterprise that size. - Teams are diverse-ish, especially in terms of age which is interesting and a stark contrast to usually young tech startups.
Cons
- Recent push for return to office - if you value remote working, don't join NWG, I suspect within 6 months there will be a full blown RTO mandate. - Company structure is like stairs to the Eiffel Tower, there's layers and layers of middle management with unclear roles who do not keep in touch in any way with the actual workers who do the jobs. - The org is full of people who worked there for 15, 20, 25 years, and understandably a lot of those people are in management and leadership due to their tenure. That means that it is likely your manager has never seen another workplace. While clearly competent in their domains, those people lack experience of other ways of working and perspectives in general, which makes driving organisational change extremely difficult. In short, some things are done really badly, and management doesn't see it as it's normal for them. - Executive leadership is very isolated, do not understand the reality 'in the trenches', talk about lofty goals without supporting initiatives to fix the basics. - Very immature / outdated working culture - no camera on meetings, new managers get no training in management, meetings are audiences for the managers to speak at people, non-managers rarely get to hold or lead a meeting. - Very little investment in staff training - they will not pay to attend any conferences, they might pay for a certification fee but not for any training or even a book to prepare for it, and you need to request it 12 months in advance before you can do it. Not at all competetive to any other tech-oriented organisation. - Incompetence is not managed, which hurts team morale. - No growth opportunities unless you're willing to switch teams or your manager quits. - 3 months notice period - not sure if that's good or bad. - Extreme process & admin bloat.
