Deutsche Bank reviews

The office in Cary is filled with incompetent senior managers. The least competent is at the top, followed by the management team. Why? Because they're cast-offs, or imports from elsewhere. The ones in banking don't understand software development, and the ones in software are the people fired from middle management of other companies. This is honestly a dead-end if you want a career. They talk about "expert path" for technical people which doesn't exist, at least not in Cary. You will have no autonomy as all the decisions are made in London and NY. Your senior manager is put in place by those same teams nervous about hiring outside of the hubs, so his job is just to work you until you quit and not to make any noise such as picking good software or practices. Your failure provides them cover to not transfer jobs from their location. They have never promoted anyone in Cary to a senior position- the last three directors weren't even from other Deutsche Bank locations; they went outside the company instead of promote one of the more than 100 existing managers or senior developers. There is a serious flight of talent- other companies are easily able to poach people who are competent, able to work under pressure, and worth every penny of their salary. Speaking of which, you used to get a bonus for all the downsides mentioned above. No more. It depends on the performance of the company to get a maximum of 4%. Take a look at the stock and you'll see how unlikely that is. Diversity is overdone- protected groups can't be fired, and no one cares to take the time to hire good talent, they just want to have bodies to fill their hiring quotas. The center head stood up in front of the employees at a town hall and said he's going to hire 50% women. What happened to equal opportunity hiring? Oh and the fitness center and cafe mentioned as "pro" are just 'meh', but I had to say something nice to fill in that box. Which is what you'll do for several hours a week- mandatory training classes for financial stuff which you'll never use as a developer but bureaucracy rules. The HR team is horrible- they live in a little private area, through a card-key door, so you can't interact with them. If you ask them a question, they'll reply with "call the hotline'. Everyone desk is a 'trading desk', meaning they've crammed people into huge open areas with the same double-monitor and phone on the side of the desks with employees 5-wide and back to back. Even call centers have more room. They've got 800+ people in one building that other residents of the office park have closer to 300 in theirs. If you need time to concentrate on working out a difficult debugging or clever software solution: give up. The noise level doesn't allow it (*See working late or weekends comment). This sardine-like setup also has an unfortunate characteristic of if someone skips a shower, everyone knows it.

I was hired under the impression that this was a "Google like" dev workshop, but every time we have a visitor from New York or London, we have to put on suits and ties to pander to our overlords. This center has zero autonomy, and no control over the products we are "in charge" of delivering.