Pros
1) The building is okay (although very noisy when it's windy) 2) There's plenty of parking 3) It's easy to get to the office if you've got reasonable access to the M18 4) The people there are very nice (except the senior management). The security staff are really nice people. 5) Before Covid, the canteen was pretty good and again the canteen staff are lovely. 6) If you're an intern or a graduate, the name would probably look good on your CV
Cons
Where do I start with the cons? This has been the worst working experience of my life. 1) It's an awful company that really has no business operating in the automotive software-engineering space. The organisation has COMPLETELY put me off ever buying a Jaguar or a Land Rover vehicle assuming JLR Shannon is representative of how they develop the internal software for their vehicles. All I can say is that my experience over the last year or so FULLY explains why JLR vehicles always come bottom of the reliability lists. 2) The senior management is obsessed with headcount and not productivity or quality. You are literally just a number. There is no interest in growing your career. Hard work and innovation appear to be viewed with suspicion. Further, If you're not Irish or if you didn't work for Intel or Valeo the glass-ceiling is about neck height. If you're an engineer, there is a clique that will prevent you from even getting a decent bonus let alone promotion. 3) Project managers, on the other hand, are promoted like crazy 4) They are losing staff at a ludicrous rate. Nobody stays long. The company may look good on your CV after college, but you won't learn much of any use. A recruiter (an old friend) recently called me to ask if the site was closing down because there were so many JLR-Shannon CVs on his desk. 5) The middle management layer is very poor indeed. 6) They say they practice Agile development but the way they do it is hilarious. It's a sort of cargo-cultist approach. They've obviously read some books on Scrum or SAFe and do the various ceremonies but they have no clue how these contribute to better and/or faster development. It's sort of how Agile might be portrayed in "The Office" if David Brent had found a book on Scrum on a train. 7) Most of the management is completely invisible and never speak to the staff on the ground. Just ivory tower guys that seem to think everything is wonderful. Maybe it is for them. It's pretty grim on the work-face though. 8) If you DO take up a position there, do not under any circumstances suggest improvements to the way things are done. NEVER criticise negligence, poor workmanship or incomplete processes/tools/standards. This is viewed not as a desire to improve quality and productivity, but as 'NEGATIVITY!' [cue musical sting]. So, even if something can be proven to be wrong, just keep your mouth shut and tell the product owner that JLR is just the wonderfullest company in the whole of Toytown. 9) The office is designed for 'hot-desking' so they can have more staff than desks. The theory is you keep the stuff you need for the office in a locker and pick any available desk in your project zone. But some genius thought it was a good idea to only have the same number of lockers as desks. If you can't see the problem with this, maybe you shouldn't be working in software development. 10) Don't expect to end up doing the job you applied for. It doesn't matter if the position you end up in is interesting to you or not. It doesn't even matter if you have little official experience doing the work or using the required tools. 11) Their (many) recruiters will actively lie to you about the prospects within the organisation. These opportunities are a complete fabrication. You can get to lower management fairly easily but no further unless you're in the special clique or an, air-quotes, project manager. As I mentioned previously, JLR Shannon is only interested in the headcount. I find it weird that they can afford over a couple of hundred staff but there's no budget for even the most trivial tools. Draw your own conclusions about that fact (in terms of Ireland's R & D tax claw-backs and generous industry grants). 12) Your work will almost certainly be thrown away. I haven't seen one piece of software developed by Shannon that has a realistic possibility of ending up on a production vehicle. How they get away with this is beyond me. What really annoys me is that I was SO excited to work there when I was first offered the position. Superficially it looked like an amazing chance to work in a fantastic environment. In retrospect it has been a truly awful experience and has wasted a significant chunk of my life. I am incredibly happy to be leaving and going back to work for a legitimate software engineering company and genuinely wish I'd never even HEARD of Jaguar Land Rover, Shannon. Unless you have a pressing need to work near Shannon or need to get this type of experience on your resume (as a stepping stone to moving onto something else), don't bother with them. You WILL regret it. They'll tell you it's a massive, ground-floor 'opportunity' on an elevator to success but it honestly isn't. It's a dead end, doing work that will literally have you wishing you get hit by an asteroid on Sunday night as a way of avoiding having to go to work on Monday. What they've done to me is just short of criminal abuse. When I've left companies in the past it's usually been with a pang of regret or, at worst, indifference. This is the first time I've walked out of the door in a state of incandescent anger.
