May have been a good company to work for at one time, but not anymore
Pros
Large, name brand IT and consulting company with operations around the globe. Reasonably flexible when it comes to working remotely. Reasonably financially stable. There are still some high-quality, smart people who work there who haven't left yet.
Cons
Corporate culture of central control. Decisions are made in Montreal and it's basically everyone else's job to blindly follow those orders. Even VPs and directors are expected to simply do as they're told. Too much focus on metrics and compliance with ridiculous HR and Quality policies. As soon as you start working there they make you do all this online training about their management frameworks and ISO quality stuff. You come out of it thinking "man, they really take their processes and frameworks seriously around here" only to find that that's pretty much the last you ever hear of it. Once you're on the job there's no more frameworks, instead your manager just throws you from one project to the next and you're expected to just get it. They have these values and the CGI dream that HR tells you about on your first day. However, it becomes clear quite quickly that no one really makes real decisions based on those values. Best example are TLOs, which stands for Temporary Lay-off. The career website says something about how they strive to have members comes first ("member"is CGI speak for "employee") yet as soon as there's no billable work for one of their "valued" members they put them on TLO which basically means that the person's fired only they don't get a severance package. So even if you've been there for say 15 years, one day HR comes and tells you you're on TLO which means starting immediately you no longer get paid. Apparently TLOs can last 35 weeks before they have to pay you the severance. They want to reduce their severance costs and are hoping you officially quit before the 35 weeks is up. If you get put on TLO, whatever you do don't resign and even if you find another job don't tell them or you'll miss the severance you're entitled to. The early warning sign for a TLO is when you no longer have billable work and they start forcing you to take vacation. So one day you can be busting your ass working on a proposal, which is non-billable, then your manager tells you that the very next day you're not to come to work but that you have to stay at home and book it as vacation (they call that "forced vacation"). And if you don't have any vacation left they make you overdraw your vacation bank. This is called "going negative" in the CGI parlance which means it's likely only a matter of days before your one TLO. I was on forced vacation for about a week before they put me on another project. This one's only about 6 months so I think I'm going to try to get out of here before that one's done, can't take the stress of being on the bench again. Basically, despite what their website says about their so called values, as soon you're no longer contributing to their bottom line, even for only a few weeks, you're quickly kicked to the curb with no notice and no severance. I would not recommend working here, but, if you are considering it, make sure you ask your recruiter how long the assignment is they're hiring you for and what happens once it's over. You might even want to ask them about TLO, I wish I did.
