Pros
Free Microsoft certs. Better compensation structure
Cons
No work life balance, No personal life. Work on weekend and long hours is extremely common. You are not given a comp off if you work on weekends. Money minded management. You will be working on 2 projects at the same time at 50% each project, you don’t need to be told that each project will churn you for 100% so you eventually tend to work at 150-200% capacity. Small things like you miss someone in the email (internal Avanade) you have an escalation. You don’t have sanity and peace of mind as from job safety point of view, you are always thinking that you can be fired for very small mistakes and tend to work more and more. There are a lot of training options, but they will not give you time to scale up. They do not assist you with leadership trainings and scaling up, they are focused on making you billable and that is what matters to them. Forget personal growth. You will have to take time out for scaling yourself up after clocking 10-12 hours everyday in project work. You will be in short term projects where you will be asked to work on a new technology stack after a few weeks or months depending on the new project you will be getting. Most if not all of their projects are with Accenture, that makes things worse, you will be an augmented resource for Accenture. You will have no relation or bonding with the team in Avanade as you will almost never be working with each other. Avanade is a Yes Sir to Accenture, so you will be screwed up if Accenture says anything about you. I have seen Avanade management make a mountain out of a mole hill, just to make you feel afraid and keep you under the reins. Personal Life of an employee does not matter in this company as they are completely focused on their projects. And yes, Microsoft just owns a share in the company, its not Microsoft. Its like any other partner for an employee. At a company level, yes, they do get more visibility into new products first and they work with MSFT on developing offerings as well. But as an employee you will not be able to take advantage of it as you will be asked to volunteer for the work along with your 2 projects. Overall, a horrible company to work for. In Canada they say look who your manager is, but I learnt here to also look for who your team is, if they are all immigrants, then you know how the work culture would be and there is a high probability that all are being exploited. Another thing they are high on focusing on females a lot. Specific programs are there. Its good to join if you are a female from that point of view, but remember there are absolutely zero initiatives for men in this company. There is a lot of politics also, but that is common in the corporate world. I would have left the company if there were opportunities outside, but unfortunately the Canadian market has as well been destroyed. Apologies for the crude language, but I did not want to spend much more time here as I have some project work to cater on a weekend. Ah, you are not allowed to charge more than 8 hours, even if you are working more than 8 hours – You know manage your time well so that you can produce a baby in 6 months instead of 9 months. They also don’t offer a sabbatical.
