- Astonishingly low salaries unless you come in as an external hire, but even then
- Astonishingly low annual pay increases (either 1% , 3% or 5% based on performance), then they gaslight you into thinking that 5% is really really really good when that's what you would normally get for average performance outside in the industry.
- "Loyalty" tax, home grown graduates get screwed because they'll start at 35-40k, but are only given 3% salary increases, so by the time you have 5 years experience, your pay will only be 46-47k. Outside of TW, someone with 5 years experience would be getting 70k+. If you hand in your notice, then they will offer you a raise, but you shouldn't have to threaten to quit to be compensated fairly.
- You are only valued if you are cheap enough for them to make money off billing you out for £1000/day. As soon as you ask for a pay increase, your value to TW starts to diminish because it means they can make less money off you, this is regardless of your performance, your brand, your network or how good you are. The only way to mitigate this is to get promoted because they'd be able to bill you for more money. TW projects are basically tech sweatshops.
- Being trapped because of diversity and inclusion, people are made to believe it's so horrible outside of TW, and so they're afraid to look or consider elsewhere and will accept the low pay.
- Boring client projects, majority of TW client work is the same, some legacy system with massive cultural and quality issues, inability to move forward due to technical debt and all the best people quit leaving the worst people behind. The clients who are able to afford TW are all the same, very established, older players who have not been able to keep up technologically. Any project you're on will have a really boring, dull domain with really crap tech, and client people who are probably incompetent and resistant to change, and you'll be dealing with lots of politics ("creating influence") and solving the problems using the same TW playbook. You'll come out with a lot of experience dealing with legacy systems, and very strong software development practices (TDD, CI/CD, XP), but it won't teach you anything about solving actually interesting greenfield technical problems. While you can definitely get an interview, you won't have the deep technical experience required to get into FAANG or any prestigious software developer role unless you already have previous experience, a background in computer science or go out of your way to do it yourself with personal projects.
- Networking usually required to get on good projects, what few good projects there are within TW, they will usually go to the consultants that have the strongest internal network (aka friends in high places). It is not uncommon for the most popular consultants to get put together on the best projects, and not uncommon for people to be accepted into projects because they've worked with someone on that team before. This is not a bad thing, but if you are not the type who likes to go out there and make friends, you are likely to be stuck on crap projects in crap locations.
- Even with a strong D&I focus, you'll still experience microaggressions because not everyone in TW is fully bought into D&I, especially with the decrease in investment in this area. Additionally, the "women" numbers come from 50%+ diverse graduates, but lots of women end up quitting as they get more experience, so there's still very few tech females in the upper ranks
- Average turnover of 3 years, by the time you hit 2 years at TW you'll start seeing people you know personally quit, and these will be people you hold in high esteem and it will make you think about quitting also. People with 3+ years TW tenure tend to be very jaded about the company
- No clear career paths for non-technical roles. If you are not a developer at TW, you won't get the same amount of training, support or role clarity. BAs and QAs are frequently roped into doing delivery management.
- Politics involved in promotions, there's a limited number of promotions available every cycle, so whether you get promoted depends on who else is asking for a promotion and whether they have a stronger case/support/backing than you.
