Capgemini

• Great work/life balance.
• Plenty of opportunities to train and claim expenses back.
• Some genuinely great, talented people.
• Plenty of opportunities to move roles, gain new experience, and exposure to different areas, whether it be engineering, architecture, project management, or business analysis.
• Great new office with free drinks and table tennis/table football.

Assesses employee remuneration against so-called 'median' for each grade rather than against industry average, without taking into consideration individual skills, knowledge, or experience.

Some teams operate within a 'dog eat dog' culture. The louder you are generally results in more opportunities, reward, and recognition.

Modesty, one of the key Capgemini values, is generally not adhered to. In my 10+ years with the company, I saw many people get promoted and rewarded simply because of how much credit they took for other, quieter people's work, as well as by standing up and doing presentations about subjects they knew very little about. One person in particular, as an example, received multiple promotions after singing their own praises at every opportunity, offering very little substance or real benefit to the work or client they were doing.

For a business that is hot on its people initiatives, culture, diversity, and equality, they do a very poor job of making male employees feel valued versus female counterparts. For example, there was an annual celebration of International Women's Day, but no celebration of International Men's Day.

Kit is not good enough, meaning productivity sometimes takes a hit. I was once told to work on my personal MacBook because of how poorly my company laptop performed. Only to then be told 4 years later by the same person (yes, 4 years, when my personal laptop was still more powerful than the garbage the business gave me), "Stop using your personal laptop or face disciplinary action!"

Progression is slow for those where the face doesn't fit, or if you're unfortunate to work with people that are not like-minded.

Usually, this means picking up the slack for colleagues doing the same role, and sometimes they're on higher grades than you. They have been with British Steel > EDS > Capgemini (been TUPE'd over the years), so the older colleagues on fantastic half-a-million-pound pensions are reluctant to embrace newer technologies and more progressive/efficient ways of working, and are just waiting to retire.

I don't know what to say, really. There are so many different managers at different levels that have no power when it comes to remuneration.

The only advice I can offer is to senior leadership, who hold the purse strings. That advice is with regard to the way Capgemini leadership dishes out pay increases at the end of the year.

The way medians per grade are calculated clearly needs a massive overhaul or rethink, because the amount of talent the business lost in my final 18 months was quite honestly staggering, to say the least.

Some of the engineers I have had the pleasure of working with and learning from in my 10+ years with the business are some of the best, brilliant-minded engineers you will come across. Given the right attention to detail in assessing individual worth, especially in the marketplace, Capgemini would retain that talent.

In my case, in particular, I had over 10 years' worth of experience working on one of Capgemini's biggest clients. So, take into consideration that experience and knowledge, along with technical knowledge working on multiple platforms and multiple cloud providers, with extensive knowledge of a lot of the older software used on the estate, as well as plenty of the newer DevOps practices and open-source software.

I was offered a measly £4,000 pay rise to stay, despite the business knowing I had been offered almost 5x more to move to a competitor. This clearly offers plenty of food for thought.

Add to this that it was general consensus amongst those unsatisfied with pay that leaving and then returning to Capgemini 12 months later normally achieved a hefty pay rise. This goes some way to telling you how underpaid those who have started from the bottom are. Go figure.