Pros
...my experience at Dionach started out pretty well in the beginning. Unfortunately it then went downhill after a month or so. Salary and benefits not bad at all depending on your title / experience and negotiation skills. Juniors and admin staff get next to nothing, but you can learn lots of new highly desirable skills if you are working towards being a fully fledged pentester / technical consultant. Pension and healthcare was included. Fairly sociable environment to work in, most people would get together for a night out in Oxford regularly.
Cons
You either fit in or you don't, plain and simple. Very high staff turn over across all departments, except Management of course. Many people that I worked with at Dionach have all left, which doesn't surprise me at all with the way employees are treated. Do you love driving around the entire country and spending half your life in a Premier Inn, writing pentest reports until late at night? Dionach will be perfect for you. As a Pro, I put fairly sociable, to expand on that there is a lot unsociable people there too...they will not talk to you, greet you as you pass by them or even look in your direction unless they want something from you. Pretty bad considering it was fully open plan office layout, only the Managers had offices and you could go days or weeks without seeing some of them. The amount of meetings that take place on a daily basis is just sad, don't get me started on the monthly one-to-one's either....complete waste of time as it is absolutely of no benefit to the employee or their line manager....just useless paperwork and a waste of an hour. You definitely need a thick skin to work at Dionach. Plenty of discussions about other colleagues behind their backs, I want to say there was a lot of 'back stabbing' and met many 'two faced' people during my time there, but it was done in such a manipulated and twisted way (mostly by the senior and long standing staff which are all still employed at Dionach by the way) that I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Make a small mistake and you will be ridiculed by these people whilst you are made to write an incident report, forever to be on display for the rest of the company to read on SharePoint. Unipart House is such a dreary place to work and have office space, good luck in finding parking too unless you're there at 7:30am every day. Elevators out of service for the majority of the time too. I was so happy to see that disgustingly old building in my rear view mirror for the last time.
