Pros
Outstanding benefits program. The "Financial City" that Santander has set up in Madrid can provide a good deal of benefits to make your life easier while at work: from subsidized kindergarden,to medical facilities with almost any specialist you need. You'll also find a sports facility quite unique with pretty much any sports field you can imagine (including a well-equipped gym). Not to mention the location in the middle of the woods which is quite impressive: walking from building to building (quite a distance sometimes) is less burdensome if you can hear the birds singing meanwhile.
Cons
So: location 10, benefits 10. The rest just get worse. Career opportunities are there for whoever wants to take it...and: a) is elder enough or b)has enough high-echelon connections. Ideally, complying with one of the above will suffice, but complying with both will boost your options. After a few years working here, is kind of obvious that Santander and meritocracy are true enemies or, in other words, if you want to raise, you need to act as if you were to survive the company...and whatever the company throws at you. Which, by the way, is going to make you choke. We are talking of one of the biggest banks in the world so basically profits come first, rest is secondary. That means you are going to have to deal with whatever you've been hired to manage according to your profile, area of expertise and so on...and whatever other random stuff 10 other people are NOT going to be hired to manage. Of course, the area of expertise of such imaginary staff need not to be related to whatever you know how/want/are capable of managing. Bottomline, you'll end up packaging company's food, selling T-shirts, analyzing financial reports, debugging IT customer service software, saying who does what, organizing a bunch of teams' work, drafting Senior Management speeches, mowing the grass, making Senior Management decisions, and even taking a 5 minute standing-still nap in the middle of somewhere. All that for a pay of....too low to be honest. As you may already have inferred work/life balance is non-existent: too cool a location comes with the drawback of being too far away from civilization and if you cross that with the absurd workload you end up spending most of your day there.
