Pros
- Great work life balance (office once a week or more) - The pay is okay for someone coming straight out of their PhD but falls behind very quickly after that - Interview and onboarding were very painless
Cons
- ELT don't communicate very well and use lots of corporate jargon - from November/December 2024 they went into a re-prioritisation of work (referring to research topics) process, meaning many research areas were and are being shut down - but refused to just say it how it was - many people being made redundant. I still don't understand the reasoning behind this, but it likely comes down to funding. Mr PM himself said he wants the "UK to become a AI superpower"... Yet many people from the UK's premier Data science and AI institute are made redundant. - Direction is hard to find, if you're a new/early stage researcher who had a good supervisor during your PhD you will find it different here. - I wasn't really afforded the opportunity to publish as the projects I got assigned on, and I quote, "did not require publication from the funder". That's fine if its one of many projects, but when you're only there for a short amount of time (again due to funding cuts/redundancies) you want as much to show for it as possible. - HR and finances are extremely slow and often misinformed, I was told things by HR regarding available internal positions, that simply were not true. - The HR system is extremely clunky and convoluted, filing for expenses is not straightforward and no one seems to know why claims get rejected. I'm still waiting for one I filed months ago