Pros
Dynamic working is great - when you're allowed to use it. Varied project work. Potential for travel. Cheap food and coffee available - quality is pretty mixed. Decent benefits. Most people are very friendly. Food allowance for breakfast (if you leave the house before 7am), lunch and an evening takeaway (if you arrive home after 8pm) are generous enough - the food allowance for a normal evening meal is not very competitive though. Business class on the Eurostar as default is very nice. Business class on flights over 6 hours (I think) is also very nice.
Cons
Overtime is paid at 1x rate. It should be higher. It is expected of basically all employees but isn't rewarded. The evening meal allowance hasn't gone up in years. It is now quite restrictive. Dynamic working is dependent on line mangers. Some are completely free with it and if you can work from home they will let you. Others arbitrarily want you in for 3 or 4 days a week, without any real reason other than to just be in. It should be consistent. I've heard that by level 5 you lose overtime, but are still expected to work 10% more hours. You can't even claim it as time off, you just accrue hundreds of hours overtime. If you don't work it, your promotion prospects may be harmed...this is an extremely poor attitude if true and makes me unlikely to stick around if I reach that level. Some line managers aren't very forthcoming with providing work. The pension isn't very competitive. The max MBDA will go to is 8% if you pay 6%. You can go above that, but it takes some effort as it isn't a default option on the site, but they won't go any higher than 8%. Only Stevenage has an onsite gym, even though it is marketed as a company wide benefit. Parking at Filton is becoming unmanageable. The method of booking time seems odd and arbitrary. You are given codes for each project you work on, and are supposed to assign hours per day to each project/code you worked on. But when doing general admin tasks, travelling, conferences etc, you're told to just spread the time around among your codes. But if you only have 1 or 2, you put a lot of time to them and may be asked what you've been doing. If that code runs out of money, you just get given other codes to change past hours to that new one. I understand why they wouldn't want to just give everyone an admit code, it may be abused, but also, this system is not good either. Especially if you don't have much work, aren't being given it when asking, and still have to book your time to 1 code. It feels very disingenuous and like you're wasting time/money/productivity. The hire car policy is very annoying. The drive between sites is long and tedious. Instead of letting you use your own car if you want to (if you have a nice car you specifically bought for comfortable long journeys), they tend to make you use the hire cars...which are always something like a manual 1.2 petrol. It's a sure-fire way to make people groggy and irritated by the time they arrive and not feel very productive.
