Pros
Very positive outlook regarding employee rights and overall happiness. A hands off approach to management - you stand on your own abilities and nobody breathes down your neck that I've noticed. This could be because the hiring process is carefully considered. There's no room for slackers in the department I work within - everyone, without exception, is hard working as a matter of principle, rather than one of demand. A very considered approach to remote working. Nobody is forced to go into an office location, but are rather encouraged. The general idea is that meetups at offices are very much that - collaborative exercises. You go into the office to connect as and when it suits work progress and team collaboration. There can be some downsides to this, see the cons.
Cons
It's a large corporate entity, owned by an even larger corporate entity - RELX. As such, there are silos - it's a massively complicated business, so there's always going to be silos. Sometimes these are a necessity in order to deal with the level of complexity. Sadly, these silos even exist between squads working on similar products or products which compliment each other. There's a lot of wasted engineering effort - a great deal of rebuilding entire solutions, just a few years after the previous solution was built. However, this is very much the norm in the entire industry. In my tenure of a few years, there's been an extraordinary amount of staff "churn". Exceptionally hard working and talented people have left for various reasons, I do wonder how many have left because of the relatively low salaries? The salary bands are not very well worked out. A senior engineer can earn more than a team lead - there's very little salary transparency. There is very little incentive to progress your career due to the salary bands. Why would I take on a managerial role and that extra stress, when the salary reward is so low? Consequently, in the area I work within, we've been losing team leads left, right and centre. It seems those that take on a lead role are doing it solely to bolster their own career progression before leaving the company shortly after. Training budgets are low and trying to get some of the budget allocation is an exercise in frustration. The company leans on their corporate Udemy account far too much. I do understand that costs need to be cut in a challenging economic environment, but the company do need to get a grip on career progression in general, or face staff churn and the associated cost of training people up again. Due to the complexity of the business, it takes a great deal of time to "onboard", so surely less staff churn is the cheaper route? Sadly, there does seem to be an increase of hiring employees in geographical areas that are economically beneficial to the corporate entity in terms of lower salaries. As such, the quality of work, the communications and staff retention are suffering as a result. It's a complicated problem to solve, I totally get that - Elsevier and RELX are a global organisation. However, regionally, you need to get the mix right - cheaper isn't always better and can work out more expensive in the long term. I've seen employees in geographical areas where salaries are lower, take 3 to 4 months to "onboard" and start contributing. Communication barriers and time zones are often to blame for this, rather than the employee. If 20% of a team are unable to attend daily meetings due to geographical time zones, that's a huge problem. How do you calculate that cost? It may look great on paper, but in practice? A false economy. The downsides to office collaboration very much lie in trying to get enough of a team to meet up physically. This also harks back to a teams where that is impossible - geographical locations. Again, this appears to be a cost exercise where certain role types in a team are "outsourced" to geographical locations on the other side of the planet. It just doesn't work. A team need to be close and if part of that team are unable to meet - even remotely - that's a fail.
