BlackRock Associate Software Developer reviews

- Pay is not that good compared to tech companies. I wouldn't have complained if that at least increased (a little if not a lot) every year but no. It'd be the same for several years and they don't care about your life changes, inflation, etc. EVERY YEAR they say the same thing "oh it's not been that good a year", even though the earnings are good? - Promotion process is a huge mess. I saw people bootlicking senior management get promoted even though they are unworthy and some talented and hard working people ignored because they actually work and not waste time talking BS and entertaining those senior management. This kind of culture is HIGHLY TOXIC and its high time people corrected it. People have taken cue and started working less and boot licking more. Also there is no clear path or definition to promotion or any measurement scale for the criteria. Its just too abstract and they expect you to already be doing the work of the role that you are trying to get promoted to. Why would I do that when I'm not getting paid for it yet? - Developer experience sucks - you get all kind of "security" crap installed on the computers that make them super slow for developers. If you don't trust software engineers to not click on stupid spam or get virus onto the computers, why hire them in the first place? The dev process becomes SUPER SLOW because of thousands of background processes running and becomes super irritating and you lose all the remaining motivation to code. How hard is it to have different policies for developers and non developers?

Within the AQE team (Aladdin Quality Engineers), all the managers care about is personal gain. A manager may sabotage your project if it is not in his interest, just so that your project fails and he gets to take over. At the AQE team it is all about the annual bonus. Nobody cares about writing good software. I'm so thankful I'm switching to a tech company. If you ever do join BlackRock, trust me on this one, do NOT join the AQE team. The CSI (Core System Infrastructure) team though is pretty cool, but within BlackRock it is quite hard to switch teams unless you are a rotational analyst. So if you sign up as an associate you are stuck wherever you start at and in that case.. please do not join AQE... The management chain is all rotten for many many layers so there is nobody you can talk to. CSI, BOES, CSO etc are all much better than AQE. Do not join! :)