Could easily be much better if it tried
Pros
1) Lower and mid ranking staff are smart, friendly and keen to help. It is sociable without being one of those offices were everyone lives in each other's pockets. There is a weekly football game, there was a pub quiz, darts/pool games in the games room at lunch time, there are drinks around pay day, also quite a few people did some volunteering together. 2) It is respected in its (niche) field and you can build up an expertise and contact base that can be very useful for future career moves. 3) The commodites markets are interesting assuming you are a bit of a geek and like details. 4) There are opportunities for promotion etc (up to a certain point). 5) starting salaries for new graduates are very good 6) there are some signs that they are trying to change things for the better and have started a career development project and asked everyone to give their views on it. 7) you don't have to wear a suit or be in work early in the morning and the new office is nice. 8) encouraged to go and meet contacts, clients, attend conferences etc 9) if you get to know the right people, you can learn a lot of useful skills like Excel 10) it is fast growing company so no horrible mass redundancies etc
Cons
1) Starting salary is good but then salaries fall behind and after three years, you can probably earn more elsewhere. 2) Management is very unreliable - some line managers are great, others are totally useless so it depends on what team you are on. But it doesn't appear that being a good manager is considered to be important so some people have got away with being bad for years. If you have a bad one, you need to try and find a good editor to give you advice and help you move. 3) it is hard to tell who is actually in charge of anything since you have an editor who hires you and appears to be your line manager and oversees pricing and commentary, a BIR editor who also tells you what to do, a news editor that also thinks he should be telling you what to do, a senior editor on some teams, and sometimes biz dev asking for things as well. So everyone can order you around but no one will tell you what the most important thing to do actually is. And none of these editors actually talk to each other 4) it is really hard to work with people from other offices because again, no one seems to actually be in charge so the people abroad don't know if they can or should work on a story with you and you don't know if or how you could ask or tell them to get some information for you. 5) technology is pretty bad, the customer platform is really old fashioned and reporters have to do a lot of work by hand to get data together. There are one or two editors around who know anything to be able to help with that.
