Cloud Engineering is no longer a good place to be
Pros
- Good benefits and flexibility - Looks good on your CV - Diversity is good, you'll work with a broad range of people - Job for life. You could potentially stay here for your whole career getting promotions, even if you're not great at your job. If you can dodge redundancy. Whether that's a pro or a con is up to you I will say that I used to love working here. It's only recently that they've made changes that have broken the culture and shifted the focus away from what made it a great place to work.
Cons
- The pay used to be good, at market rate. They've recently updated the salary bands and they're now below market rate. - Job security is significantly reduced as they've shown they will do redundancies and offshore roles even when they're making a profit. - There's so much red tape that innovation is stunted and getting simple things finished is slow and painful. - As you progress, your role merges into the same role as every other (senior) manager regardless of your capability. You won't get a chance to use your specialist skillset as you're too busy talking about budgets, resourcing, cost codes and performance. - As a consultant (which if you join new you will be, as all internal work is being offshored) there is surprisingly little structure to being on the bench. You have to know the right people to find work, otherwise you can sit on the bench doing self-led learning for over a year. - Utilisation is everything, and it's largely out of your hands. If you want to attend a meeting you will lose util. So if you want to attend town halls but also keep a good util % you'll need to work over your contracted hours which they indirectly encourage. As you might expect from a consultancy they don't want you to be on the bench, but your end of year rating also depends on you not being there and there's only so much you can do to help them win work as an engineer. - Performance rating is less about how good you are at your job and more about how well you can play the game. Make yourself visible, attend volunteering, get certifications. Anything that differentiates you instead of simply acknowledging outstanding performance in the role you were hired to do.