Pros
Slight opportunity to get experience in different industries. Some employees will create study groups to pass certifications and share knowledge. Some remote work, but really depends on the client. Extended Benefits is like a guaranteed bonus, but it's limited to what you can spend it on. New stock opportunities with Accenture, Avanade's parent company. There really are a lot of great, nice people to work with. Once you get on a project with people you like working with, you need to do everything you can to keep extending on that project, because the unfortunate risk is that another project has a high chance of being the opposite, especially when run by Accenture leadership, but also with more and more Avanade managers. It's a job. Of course that's good, but it's also a way to springboard your career elsewhere. Get certified, gain industry skill, pad up that resume, and get a better job at a company that does what you like to do and use technologies that you like to work with.
Cons
You are a resource. That's it. They show off that "employees are Avanade's #1 asset", but that's all smoke and mirrors. You are there to make money for the company. That's it. They have no loyalty to you outside of that, if you can even call that loyalty. By default, they'll give you an underpowered laptop as if all we do is write Word documents. You need to prove an exception to get a more powerful one, as if being a software engineer isn't proof enough. Benefits shifted to be aligned with Accenture. Health Insurance options got A LOT more expensive. You have almost no say at all in the projects you go to and the technologies you work with. They will lock you onto a project either without your knowledge or no chance for you to say no, so you can't go to a different one where you could grow your career with skills and technologies you like. You go where they want you to. Your only chance is to be lucky enough to roll off a project and another one has stuff you like to work on. If you're lucky. They do pay for certification exams, but that's about the only good thing. They push the agenda to get them, but it's ONLY to check the boxes and flaunt some gold status to the world about how many employees are certified. Your chances of getting on a project to use those certifications is almost nil. Again, you get staffed on projects they want to put you on. No clear guidelines on what qualifies you for promotion to the next level. It's drastically different between regions and even changes within a region with each cycle. Reasons they gave for stack ranking someone one time won't necessarily be applicable to others the next time. That makes it very difficult to know what to work on to get promoted. There's often very little notice that your project is about to end. Getting onto many projects requires a round of interviews, which you might as well apply full-time to work at that client instead. It's practically the same process. There is a clear leftist agenda. You need to be woke enough to work here. Avanade is in lock step with making sure you jump on that bandwagon. They definitely do that through their townhall meetings (such as their lecture about "white privilege" and "police brutality", trying to make us feel guilty about it, which was utterly disgraceful) and compliance training, but also through insinuated pressures via other meetings and company-wide emails. You need to remain silent, otherwise, if you have moral and ethical values in life.
