Pros
- Amazing offices, free food and drinks, great amenities. - Great pay, but the employee share scheme makes manging your tax obligations more difficult. Be sure to implement strategies to reduce your taxable income via voluntary super contributions etc. Otherwise expect to owe money to the ATO. - Work with very smart people and great tech. - International Togetherness Gatherings twice a year (used to be 4, slowly reducing, might be gone by now), paid by company. - Regional Togetherness Gatherings, paid by company. - Happiness, stress and work life balance is heavily team dependant.
Cons
The culture is degrading and the work life balance is pretty poor due to the work culture shifting to being extremely high performing in fear of losing your job every 6 months due to the APEX Performance Reviews which employs stacked ranking. It's ruined the culture, workplace feels like Hunger Games, people are less likely to help you or support you if there's nothing in it for them. Work life balance is very poor - could be team dependant, but most colleagues from other teams I spoke to express the same issues. If you fall below the bell-curve, you are PIP'd or offered a separation pacakge, without consideration of personal circumstances or past acheivements, the goal post continously moves and it's harder to reach. Taking any extended period of annual leave, sick leave or carers leave can put your deliverables or overall project impact at risk, which in turn negatively impacts your performance. You are required to participate in the APEX cycle if you worked 50% of the half, if you were to take extended carers leave or sick leave during the half and your manager tries to vouch for you to the committee reviewing your performance and explain your personal circumanstances, HR shuts the conversation down - objective performance results only. Seeking feedback or ollaborating with colleagues from other teams or your team can negatively impact your performance review, your manager might considered it lack of leadership (personal experience). The company is always hiring because they are constantly firing - mostly for the wrong reasons, giving you very little room or time to grow. Many engineers with long tenures 5-20 years have recently left due to the issues described above and expressed by many other reviews (internal blogs). One last thing - promotions are extremely difficult, they would rather hire someone new to take the higher role than promote someone skilled enough within the team who's been going for that promotion and been in the company for 5 years.