Fulfilling but intense to work with, flat management and politics problems
Pros
This is a consultancy. That means the typical stuff: lots of small or large projects, high pressure to perform and present well (at clients especially), travel. Benefits are very good, including high pay and free health care. There are clear performance structures around promotion and career paths within the organisation. Relatively relaxed company attitude as a consultancy, good policies on equality (gender, ethnicity, LGBT, facilitation of transgender gender transition, etc). Diverse workforce, internal LGBT ally network.
Cons
Medium-to-low work/life balance (but nobody joins consultancies if they want work/life balance). Unlike other consultancies Avanade discourages overtime and actually sticks to that philosophy. Despite the fact there's clear performance structures around promotion, they are gamed: people set goals and are measured against those goals. This means a person could set themselves a goal of three textbooks, read three, and "meet expecations", while a person sets themselves a goal of one textbook, read two, and "exceed expectations". There's lots of projects and they market the idea you get to choose and influence what you work on, but they don't tell you how to do that. (The way is to build close relationships with the salespeople and project managers, apparently. They don't tell you how to do that either, nor facilitate doing so in any way.) This means you do the projects you're given based on what's available, without much or any ability to steer the technologies you're working with. Training is currently very disorganised in the UK (2016-2017). They promise a lot, but can deliver very little in terms of actually placing people on courses and certification. I managed to do some excellent courses, but had colleagues leave out of being unable to study and follow the lines of work they were promised on being hired. Flat management structures mean if two separate Avanade managers are telling you to do different things, nobody can resolve the difference for you. You either go over 100% to do both or you're thrown under the bus for failing to meet expectations. You will have at least three direct managers most of the time: a career manager within the organisation called a "career advisor" who is your go-to manager but has no project authority, and your project manager, and your team manager within the project. There are also business division managers (like software development manager, etc) but they don't tend to get involved. The company boasts visions for how it wants to grow but those visions have never in my tenure related whatsoever to the software developers at the company. They are visions for the sales, marketing, and executive wings. The people on the ground (developers, engineers, analysts, etc) are expected to get involved but given the low control over what we do (we take work as it comes) there's no real way for us to do that, except via extra-curricular effort (and I don't know how we do that -- we're not told). Speaking of which, extra-curricular effort is often required for promotions. We choose our goals out of a range, but the range often involves those business goals we can't influence. Things like creating and running an online training workshop help with career advancement, but creating that workshop and running it are done entirely out of your 8 daily project hours. (So when they discourage overtime, they don't factor in extracurricular activity and actively make room for it in your 8 daily hours.) Some of those promotion goals are not things we can predict: one promotion goal involves achieving certain goals within a project, but we can't predict that any given project will give us that opportunity, and we have to choose our promotion goals in advance. It's kind of a mess.
