Demanding place to work, with less than generous compensation
Pros
Generally the people I worked with were quite intelligent, motivated and professional.
Cons
I joined MSCI as a part of a an acquisition. While initially excited to join a larger firm with ostensibly greater resources, I found that over time my group and by extension my job was increasing burdened with bureaucracy. By the time I left, it was quite difficult to actually get things done, as over 70% of my time was occupied by figuring out how to obtain and then chasing down the approvals for any given task. Part of this is the nature of dealing with highly sensitive, market moving financial data. However it became apparent that more and more folks were afraid to make a decision for fear of making the wrong decision and then subsequently getting hammered by upper management. As a result, doing the actual work contained in my job description became secondary and thus very dissatisfying near the end of my tenure. I would also note that MSCI is at its core a data firm. And because data can essentially be moved anywhere there is a persistent and ongoing effort to arbitrage labor costs and move them to lower cost offices.
