BlackRock reviews

Working there was a horrible. Specifically worked under the Aladdin Tech Group as a BA. You are brainwashed into thinking that your sacrifice in time and efforts are a given but are worth it. You are expected to do 24 hrs of work in 12 hrs time so you end up in office past 12am. You think you are working so that you can move forward but you will be thrown under the bus in a blink of an eye. People will use you and step on you to further their own agendas. There is no support, no foundation. There is no merit based rewards. It is never enough. I was brainwashed so badly into thinking that it was normal to dedicate myself to work that my body broke down. My mind didnt realized it wasn't right. As an otherwise healthy 25 year old, I managed to develop shingles. My doctor told me it was from stress as it usually is something that only the really old or really young gets. Pay wasn't even good enough for me to say that it was worth it. Even on good years, there was never more than 5-9% bonus. Run away.

• Screwed up incentives. In general, people are not really given incentive to do their jobs well. Good performance is rarely rewarded, bad performance is rarely punished. As far as I know, the bonuses are more-or-less evenly distributed to be about 1 monthly salary, literally not even depending on your actual performance. I also think that incentives aren’t set well on a firm-wise level. The “anything that can be sold to the clients is already good enough” attitude is not driving people here to make good solutions, especially in markets artificially created by regulatory rules. • There are some demotivated people. If you engage a random employee in a 1on1 deep conversation, and show that it is okay to be actually honest, and you ask about how they feel about BlackRock, they often will end complaining for an extended period of time, and say that this is just a stepping stone for them, a good place to learn, but they don't think of staying here long term. In fact, how much people believe that BlackRock is a great place is strongly correlated to how much they have to sell that "BlackRock is a great place" to others. HR who has to sell the firm to possible hires, or client facing teams might be overly positive, but isolated teams like FMG might be overly negative about it. • Tech solutions aren’t too cutting edge. Most of the tech solutions here are rather deprecated. There are codebases in such shape, that most of the people agree that only a complete rewrite could save them. You sometimes better off reimplementing something than using the previous work of another BlackRock employee. • Teams are organized in an ineffective way. The HR of BlackRock really believes that diversity makes better teams. The employees of BlackRock actually like to make fun of how much it does not work, and how most of the people dislike working in such teams. But diversity here also implies that teams are usually spread across multiple locations - often with huge time zone difference, making even more difficulties in teamwork. • Planning for the future is undervalued. The management only have supper vague plans for the future, that are not detailed enough for practical use. Even for current projects, there are often no specifications or detailed plans. • High turnover. Most of the BlackRock employees leave after a few years. For software developers, the "senior developer" layer is almost completely missing. There are managers who have been here for more than 10 years, and there are juniors who joined in the past 3 years, but there's not much people in between. • The talent pool is not that exceptional. While this is strongly subjective, I personally felt more satisfied with the talent pool at my last workplace, even though it payed less money than BlackRock.