Avanade reviews

-I guess anyone with positive remarks of this company must have not worked at a legitimate job before... so they don't know how a truly 'good' job can be intellectually interesting, challenging, high-paying, with good skill-set growth opportunities... none of which applies to this job even remotely -I left this company a while ago, but recently learned that my friend who used to work here got laid off since he was on bench (unstaffed) for months, where the company wasn't able to find enough projects for its resources. Following this, I feel obliged to warn people considering joining this firm (or any other 'consulting' gig like this) with sobering facts that I've witnessed -During my stint, I witnessed DOZENS of such lay offs as described above within just one fiscal year -If you are on functional team ('Business Analyst', 'Consultant', whatever), only skills you are building is Microsoft Word (how to write documents) and front-end Microsoft technologies (AX, CRM, SharePoint, etc). Most projects are IT implementation body-augmentation projects where the most interesting work you could ever hope to do is to talk to clients and write down their notes. If not, you are stuck for months on 'testing' the system, doing garbage work such as writing test scripts, etc. I would be surprised if anyone thinks such tasks are either interesting, or if anyone actually believes such job experiences helps your career from skill-set standpoint -Mediocre coworkers in terms of talent. I've met many people here who couldn't do 6th grade-level algebra. Now that I think about it, you probably don't need much intellect nor skills to do the job at this company, at least on the functional side... -Very little skill development: if you go up to a manager-level employee on the functional side, and ask him/ her to do a simple task in Excel or SQL, chances are overwhelming that they probably couldn't do a thing. Actually, most likely, they probably don't even know what 'Pivot Table' is or 'Left Join' implies, which testifies to the lack of skill-set growth on jobs like these. -This job, in most cases, leads to a dead-end career. If you are happy to do mindless IT implementation work for the rest of your life doing tasks like testing, documentation, or what not, this is the job for you. If you actually want a job where you can expect to do some type of data analysis, or where using your brain is not frowned upon, don't even consider taking this job. (or other 'consulting' gigs like this one - Pure IT staff augmentation gigs) -Overall, this job gets a terrible review from me (and a lot of people I knew at the firm shared the sentiments above) due to: lack of job security, lack of interesting work, lack of project work, lack of skill-set growth, extremely political working environment, and lack of 'normal' working conditions (you need to travel to random places weekly for this gig) -One last remark. One time a coworker that used to be on the same project as me doing 2 months of 'testing' the system asked me why I looked so depressed. My reply: "This job sucks"

You are a resource. That's it. They show off that "employees are Avanade's #1 asset", but that's all smoke and mirrors. You are there to make money for the company. That's it. They have no loyalty to you outside of that, if you can even call that loyalty. By default, they'll give you an underpowered laptop as if all we do is write Word documents. You need to prove an exception to get a more powerful one, as if being a software engineer isn't proof enough. Benefits shifted to be aligned with Accenture. Health Insurance options got A LOT more expensive. You have almost no say at all in the projects you go to and the technologies you work with. They will lock you onto a project either without your knowledge or no chance for you to say no, so you can't go to a different one where you could grow your career with skills and technologies you like. You go where they want you to. Your only chance is to be lucky enough to roll off a project and another one has stuff you like to work on. If you're lucky. They do pay for certification exams, but that's about the only good thing. They push the agenda to get them, but it's ONLY to check the boxes and flaunt some gold status to the world about how many employees are certified. Your chances of getting on a project to use those certifications is almost nil. Again, you get staffed on projects they want to put you on. No clear guidelines on what qualifies you for promotion to the next level. It's drastically different between regions and even changes within a region with each cycle. Reasons they gave for stack ranking someone one time won't necessarily be applicable to others the next time. That makes it very difficult to know what to work on to get promoted. There's often very little notice that your project is about to end. Getting onto many projects requires a round of interviews, which you might as well apply full-time to work at that client instead. It's practically the same process. There is a clear leftist agenda. You need to be woke enough to work here. Avanade is in lock step with making sure you jump on that bandwagon. They definitely do that through their townhall meetings (such as their lecture about "white privilege" and "police brutality", trying to make us feel guilty about it, which was utterly disgraceful) and compliance training, but also through insinuated pressures via other meetings and company-wide emails. You need to remain silent, otherwise, if you have moral and ethical values in life.