Pros
- Great people, I had lots of fun and learned a lot from them. - Great place to start, many opportunities, many people to learn from. - Relaxed environment. - Good equipment. - Flexible time and possibility of working from home. - Looks great in your CV! - Very stable company. - It's really cool to work for TV, you get to see the studios, learn how they deliver the content and learn some trivia no one else knows. - You can move between teams, departments and even types of job. It's difficult, but possible. - Relocation is easy. - There is a BBC club with discounts, language courses, gym, etc. - You can watch anything the BBC has been producing in the past years. - You can access decades of archives (if you make an effort, and if you heave sufficient clearance).
Kontras
For starters, the BBC don't usually explain to candidates in London about the "London weighting". This weighting is part of the gross salary, so it is a bonus that will not be "added" to your income, but deducted if you move to another city. The BBC is huge. It means things can be very bureaucratic. The HR department is located in Northern Ireland, and so is some of the IT support. That must be alright for people who live there, but for people elsewhere it's a bit of a stretch to get some help from them. Projects can be badly defined because there are so many people involved and no one is really sure how things will progress. That means that while some projects have far off deadlines, some atypical last-minute requirements appear out of the blue and people have to deal with it. The BBC is divided into Television, Radio and Design and Engineering. D&E normally hires contractors for most projects, and since they are quite competent, they make key decisions some times. And when these decisions are taken unilaterally they can backfire on the permanent staff. It happened several times in my department. There is no proper training for newcomers. While there is a BBC introduction course, it is very generic and you have to figure a lot of your work by yourself unless someone steps in. IT support is not great. It is often time-consuming and stressful. I saw people using their private software licences to work because they couldn't be bothered to ask for support. That's not nice. Salary is below industry standards and the only perks are salary deductible. If you work for the BBC, you don't get a TV licence discount. So if you pay the licence, you pay your own salary... It doesn't make much sense. The BBC has to many managers. I had 7 managers in a hierarchy and 3 transversal managers. Some of them have very mysterious jobs. The BBC's main income is the TV licence. Since an article was published in a newspaper about a party organised by the BBC, they stopped doing events for their employees. So the BBC tends to always attempting to be thrifty. But some times it is too much. For example, they don't invest enough in training. There is some training, but few and far in between. Saving money also leads to debates with unions. The last time it happened (around 2016) they froze all promotions. That can make things very slow in career progression and the only way up is applying for jobs as if you never worked at the BBC before. And that can take some time. BBC software development teams do not normally use agile methodologies, even though they say they do. All in-house software must be wired at some point to a main, central database and it is immense. There is no code re-factoring. Software efficiency is considered less important than making it look nice. Also, the BBC never ever deletes data. There is an endemic paranoia that all data collected is useful, which is not true. BBC's databases tend to infinity. The food halls are a mixed bag. The food halls at New Broadcasting House and Broadcast Centre are expensive and the food isn't great. Access to places like Television Centre, for example, is limited to certain people. TVC has very decent food, though, and it's a block away from BC, but alas, if you work at BC, you can't get into TVC unless you are being invited. The reason being that TVC is not really BBC, it is BBC Studios, a different company. You don't get to travel much between BBC branches, not even within the same city. Only on very special occasions like training or some very important department meeting. That's a bit of a shame, because knowing the other branches could mean more networking, and that can be very useful in a place like BBC.