Pros
Good office location (Glasgow city center) Quite good salary in compare with other Scottish companies Holidays Flexible working hours , normally 9-17 , no over hours in my team Possible to work from home Possible to change team inside company Bicycle parking in the basement
Cons
Poor technical expertise on all levels. A lot of incompetent people even among team leaders. And even you are qualified enough you can be under the leader who don't know some basic computer science conception. I know the people who lead the web app project without relation database knowledge. I mean at all. Can you imagine the code quality? Moreover in the same time the same person don't understand the principles the object oriented programming. I mean at all even such basic things like inheritance and interfaces. I have never seen such unqualified people. Politics and meetings, meetings , meetings. A lot of bureaucracy, you need to get approvals for everything. Chaotic management, very often project manager in US and available only by conference calls. No architecture design as class, usually the only criteria "it should work, no matter how" No algorithmic challenges, just stupid monkey coding like read from db / write to db and display something on web page. And because of this no learning and development for you. Nobody care about how good are you as software engineer, it is much better to have strong communications skills. Looks like they don't need engineers. In the bank they need people who can demonstrate that they do something. So typical bank managers psychology. Performance review are more important that real work. Forced visualization as mentioned on of the previous reviewers, yes. If you are linux /unix developer, you have to live on virtual machine. Terrible overcrowded office. Often desks installed literally in the passages. Once I have seen that 5 developers sitting on the 4 desks. Desks compression! A lot of people -> difficult to find vacant toilet. Difficult to find table in canteen during the lunch time. Really I can't recommend this place for experienced engineers. If you want to concentrate on technical tasks this place is not for you. May be it depends the team. But my impression is like this.