- Unpaid "training" period - during the time I was there, I was given a regular £20-30 C# book and told to sit at a computer and work through it. This was supposedly worth £20k.
- FDM takes a huge cut of the pay. When I started, they were paying £12k base with £6 an hour, which was later changed to £18k base with £2 an hour (giving everyone a pay cut), but most people are charged out to clients at somewhere in the ballpark of £300 a day.
- if you try and leave, they threaten to hit you with a 20k training bill... although I also know a few people who have left without paying, I think FDM tries to bury that news
- if you end up at a client who makes you work longer than your 37.5/40 hours, FDM expects you to do unpaid overtime
- no sick pay
- took a month to start between getting a placement and starting onsite, all unpaid
- was put into a programming in a language I had no experience in, and different from what the account manager told me it was going to be, when I mentioned this, I was told more training would be arranged for me, but this never materialised in the 2 years Incidentally, the client did want me to go onto more training, but FDM wasn't willing to pay for it, and the client felt they were already paying FDM for the training, and weren't willing to pay somebody else to train me on top
In general, FDM don't want to hear from you when you're on site and making money for them, the less they hear from you the better, all they want is your timesheet. They have no real interest in career development or training.
Also, if you look through most of the reviews, they break down into two categories.
1. The good reviews are usually people who work for FDM as account managers/trainers/etc, and the occasional person who had no IT experience and got it via FDM
2. The poor reviews are basically everyone who FDM took on to send out to clients, most of the people who work at FDM are the latter, they do their 2 year stint (unless they can get out quicker) and then get out.
Last comment I would make is that FDM pay companies to manage their online reputation and spend a fair bit on marketing, so they get good write ups in a lot of places
