Pros
- 9-5 job, so 35 hours per week, which is less than 37.5 or 40 hours that is common elsewhere - Friendly atmosphere. There are/were some genuinely nice and very capable people that work(ed) here. - Allowance towards free breakfast each morning - sweet treats every Friday - good internal training
Cons
- Outdated work practices: 9 to 5 rigidly enforced, no flexible hours or working from home - which is not great, especially if you are a parent - Some of the technologies used, especially in QA, are quite outdated (Quality Center is dead, but Fidessa still spend £££ on licences) - Generally there's far too much focus on creating tools in house, rather than investing in usage of industry standard software packages. This inevitably means much of the knowledge learned on the job is Fidessa specific, so not transferable. - Salary and bonuses some way below industry average - Pension contribution is at bare legal minimum, which is rubbish for a financial company - No car parking for employees, even in the Woking office. So people have to park miles outside of town and walk, or else bear the cost of parking in shopping centre multi-storeys. - Since ION bought Fidessa over, their senior management have been dishonest and deceitful about pretty much everything - from paying bonuses to giving salary reviews, and making redundancies after initially talking about retaining talent. - People who have been there for years/decades are leaving in droves. Most teams have been reduced to bare skeletons, and are barely able to function. Unsurprisingly, this has had a hugely negative impact on morale and productivity. It is only a matter of time before this in turn affects shipped products, and once problems arise there will be no one with the required expertise left to do anything about them. - Work is stealthily being sent to other regions such as India which are obviously cheaper. So soon there won't be much of Fidessa (or ION capital markets as it's now a part of) left in the UK.