Pros
Amazing colleagues, smart people, great technology, better work/life balance than other banks on the street. Clubs organised by employees to enjoy some bonding outside of work.
Cons
Apologies for the bloc of text but I needed to vent. Promotion ======= Opaque promotion process, bottleneck for promotion within the department. You first need to obtain a "ticket" from management to even be considered for the promotion process as one of the candidates. If luckily your management does not dismiss your "requests" for promotion, you get the ticket. You will then be presented as candidate by your manager who will defend your achievements in front of a committee. If your manager does not want to bother helping you in your career or is junior, forget about career advancement. If your manager is not good at defending or articulating thoughts, forget about promotion. The promotion criteria are a moving target. Once you think you know them, you are told that last year they changed for your region. Of course, the official document containing the criteria is confidential and not readable by aspiring candidates. Typical promotion topics responses from different people (when you manage to hold a career convo with someone): "Maybe in 3-4 years we can come back to this conversation." "You need sponsors in IT and business units to support your candidacy. Your achievements and experience alone are not enough." --> i.e. A big chunk of your time goes to networking and making friends with people for the sole purpose of checking this box. "Look at X, they have been volunteering for months." --> i.e. Why don't you volunteer on top of your paid daily duties for free so maybe we can promote you? Why don't you start yet another useless meetup for people in the office to show your name around? "You should know how well you perform against other people in your local team. I'm surprised you do not know." --> I am the only one in my location working on my project and do not interact with others in my department, yet they are a factor in the recognition I get from the company? Do they know how well they perform against me, a person that has nothing to do with them? Really? "You are meeting expectations this year." "But I did XYZ on top of my daily duties, mentored people etc. and went above and beyond compared to others." "I summarised the feedback from your colleagues and mine in the improvement section for you. They are not all mine. I think you should focus on the first feedback first for this year." "Can you give me an example where that happened and how I should have behaved?" "No... recently it was good." --> Then why is it in my review? Me in my 1:1 with manager: "Do you have any feedback for improvement?" "No." "How can I improve to get promoted?" "Let's wait. Let's not get ahead of ourselves." --> It leaves me with a feeling that management wants to see me as a junior, like the other members of my team regardless of my experience. I need to fit their agenda of "my manager is the one that will help me grow and thanks to them I will get to the level where I can get promoted..." regardless of my actual situation. Pay === Subpar pay compared to other banks on the street like GS. Feeling shared by other people I talked to in the office. The last global survey showed that ~50% of employees are not happy with their pay. We are talking about a top tier bank that "does business in a first class way". Events are organised in the company but they kind of give a vibe of "bread and games!" to keep employees happy. I mean, I am probably exaggerating here given those are organised by genuine people that care, but I feel like it benefits upper management in that way. People ===== You meet amazing people but the common behaviour in my department has been to slap low quality code into the codebase. In the beginning in my previous projects, no one cared about unit tests, integration tests bits were copy pasted all over. People dismissed my arguments that adding tests would make our lives easier. There were patches everywhere, deployments into production from 10 different branches because it's too difficult to verify that all changes added on the master branch are safe for some specific environments. My current team (last 2-3 years) cares much more about testing in general which is good, but still sometimes I need to fight on pull requests reviews to make devs review their design but sometimes I lose because "we'll change this later". Then X months later I need to code a feature and I need to pay the technical debt fee when I use/update their code. No one in my current department bothers to update their coding setup proactively. I had to push to make them use linters for Python etc. so that people that have the tooling enabled on their side do not spend their time fixing syntax errors and code smells. In some occasions I had to communicate very important things to senior management in situations that were quite scary for me. I never got a reply, even though I spent weeks on top of my work to investigate and prove that I had not done anything wrong. Work location and remote ================= We moved to a super limited "work from another location" that requires MD approval. I think it's a very small amount of days of remote work per trip in a location. I know Japanese companies that allow 1 months per year. Shouldn't we be at least as good as Japanese black companies? Diversity and Inclusion =============== Great push for D&I but it creates reverse discrimination against people that are not part of a minority or diverse (diverse meaning female in Japan). I applied for internal mobility and was told after 4 months that I had not been considered until then because they were considering diversity candidates instead of me. Great job at creating equal opportunities. Conclusion ======== I have given up on promotion. It feels like swimming against the current. If I go above and beyond, I meet expectations. If I work at 60% I meet expectations. What's the point of slaving away for no reward? Consequence is I do care less about some things now. I care less about how people see me in the team. Sometimes on Sunday nights I get insomnia because I replay frustrating things from work in my head. I don't need a free subscription to Headspace, I need objectivity at work and recognition. If you have no recognition to give me, then make me work on stuff to earn it and please stop the gaslighting. I am looking around to find a better paying job and management that listens. The only thing keeping me there is how nice my close colleagues are. Seriously, my domestic partner is getting almost twice my pay at a competitor. They are laughing at my bonus and increase every year. Go to a competitor if you want career progression. Some people here have been 10+ years in the business without getting to VP.