Pros
- Many genuinely nice and capable colleagues. - Relaxed offices and casual dress code unless you are meeting customers. - Financially stable and profitable, so the salary and benefits can be good if you don't sell yourself short. - Esri software is the industry standard. Having the name on your CV opens doors. - Some interesting customers and projects to work on. Career advancement is possible if you're proactive about preparing for opportunities that might come up. - The company generally respects a good work-life balance (more so in some roles than others, but especially for recent mothers).
Cons
- Top-down, permission-oriented culture that doesn't reward employees who take the initiative. Every idea for improving business processes or technical systems has to be suggested by one of the directors, otherwise it's not taken seriously. This leads to a fairly high churn of good staff who feel taken for granted or not listened to. - There aren't enough people with the skills and responsibility to work on projects relative to the number of managers and other decision-makers. It's not uncommon for progress meetings to include three or four stakeholders and only one person doing any work. - Different departments work in isolation from one another, and there is little mutual understanding or collaboration across disciplines. Because teams have different and sometimes conflicting performance objectives, there's a fair amount of pulling in opposite directions. - A lot of money is wasted on internal projects and initiatives of dubious commercial value, but which cannot be shut down for political reasons. - As a software reseller, Esri UK is very dependent on what the American parent company (Esri Inc) does. Unfortunately, Esri Inc embodies many of the cons listed above, but on an even bigger scale.
