Pros
MS used to be a pretty interesting place to work. My co-workers were bright and highly motivated, and there was a real culture of excellence and meritocracy. Unfortunately, all that has now been overturned in the pursuit of "equity" and leftist box-ticking. The recruitment and promo processes are now weighted against males and white people, and as a result MS is now on a slow slide to irrelevance and oblivion.
Cons
I worked at MS for nearly a decade. I left because of 2 main reasons : (1) short-sighted cost-cutting mentality that focusses on hitting next year's financial targets at the extent of building a skilled and motivated workforce. I got sick of hiring and training good people only to see those same people fired a year or two later. This happened repeatedly during my decade at the firm. (2) excessive pandering to left-wing "social justice" causes that prioritises certain demographics over others, regardless of job competency To expand on the first point, many teams at MS are chronically understaffed. The firm has incredibly complex systems with decades of history, a huge backlog of important regulatory work - but not enough people to do it all. Rob Rooney (head of technology) made a series of deep cuts in late 2019 in a bid to hit profitability targets, which caused morale to plummet. The firm only started to hire again the start of 2021. The problem is that every single team is now in a mad bidding war and HR is struggling under the load. We're therefore forced to engage external consulting firms (aka bodyshops) in a desperate bid to get more people in before the gates close again. There's another problem... The location strategy. MS is pushing hard to cut costs in "metro locations" and hire cheap workers in India and East Europe. Many managers have been instructed not to make any more hires in London or New York. The problem is that we need people with a very specific set of skills, and those people simply don't exist in other locations (certainly not in the numbers we need). We also lack good senior managers in many of the locations that we're allowed to hire into. Quality control is becoming a serious problem. Result : an influx of new people with little finance experience, and often only passable tech skills. There are also language barriers that cause frequent confusion. Then there's also the whole "diversity and inclusion" agenda. You can't escape this stuff in a big org, but at MS it is out of control. MDs have been instructed to hire more females and minorities or "there will be consequences" (to quote from an older Rooney town-hall). The result has been a sharp decline in quality. There simply aren't enough good female engineers to go round, so what do we do to hit the target ? Lower the standards of course. I was hired after a gruelling 3 hour interview which tested my financial and IT knowledge to the limit. We're now making hires based on a thirty minute Zoom call. We're also passing over highly qualified males in a bid to hit targets. The inevitable result is a large influx of underqualified hires who are just going to drive out the few remaining talented people. The D&I agenda carries over into the promo process too. The process goes like this : first, a panel of peers interviews the relevant stakeholders and objectively ranks the promotion candidates based on their ability and achievements. Then, the list is passed on to an MD who shuffles people around to make sure we hit all the right "diversity" targets (and to ensure that his/her year-end bonus doesn't get cut). Result : perfectly good people get moved down the list because they're not the right gender and/or colour. Of course, they're never told why they got passed over, since that might expose the firm to legal action. Nice. On a related topic : shortly before I left I was repeatedly nagged to attend training courses informing me about my "white privilege" and I have also been subjected to regular emails about the firm's commitment to social justice issues and (shudder) "racial equity". I can't begin to tell you how repellent I find this brainwashing. To have an investment bank, a bastion of free-market capitalism, peddling hard-left propaganda to its staff ? Please just leave me along and let me get on with my work. Personally, I'm thoroughly sick of being subjected to divisive political propaganda while I'm trying to earn a living. The barrage of woke drivel is getting unbearable and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who's fed up with it.