Pros
Some really nice people and nice offices. Offices close to public transport hubs. Sink or swim culture means you can gain a lot of technical experience and skills and soft skills extremely quickly If you play the game, you can climb the internal career ladder quickly. After working here, any other job will feel like a walk in the park.
Cons
Several; Terrible terrible micro-management culture - which is utterly soul destroying and degrading Flexi-time is a waste because you're expected to work over your hours and there's so much work to do there's little opportunity to use it Recording every 15 minutes of your working day to a project. So if you spend 15 minutes making a round of tea for the office, either charge it to a project and risk going over budget or expect to stay at work an extra 15mins to make up the time Small profit margins on projects, meaning working to budget is near impossible and incredibly stressful High pressure environment, claimed by the company to be the nature of the business but is often down to incompetent project managers or team leaders Deadline after deadline after deadline Back stabbing Blame culture No trust between senior staff and their team or office No (useful) training Overloaded with work Expected to work your contracted hours as a bare minimum No regard for your personal life, wellbeing or career Empire building between individuals, teams and offices Awful blame culture Expected to be an expert at everything Sink or swim culture Poor pay, holiday allowance and benefits Expected to attend some meetings and undertake some work (e.g. training, any HR task such as completing a annual probation review) outside contracted working hours A business model based on few senior staff distributing work to a high turnover of extremely low paid junior staff Generally a life-sucking place to work. You'll only succeed there if you're willing to self-promote and lie your way to the top, or if you have no personal life or no regard for your mental wellbeing and enjoy being spoken down to and made to feel like a child. A toxic environment, and I wouldn't recommend working there to anyone. It contributed to mental health issues which went away the day I left