Pros
When I started to work as an intern at Morgan Stanley, I practically had no clue about Software Engineering. Within the 4 and a half year spent there, I learned a lot there, made me to have a solid knowledge. Good place to learn at the beginning of your career, but you have to be lucky to find a good team. I had quite cool teammates, so coffee breaks were enjoyable. There are a bunch of inspiring people. You can have a good work-life balance (well this depends on the team and a project a little bit), don't have to worry about spending some time with dealing personal life cases.
Cons
A lot. Morgan Stanley states, that it's IT department is one of the best, and it depends on the technology stack very much, still there is tech career path. The next step, after you get there as a Technology Associate, that is somehow tries to cover the role of Software Engineer, DevOps, Infrastructure Engineer, etcetera, is the Vice President title. That takes at least 5 years and very much luck, if you are at the beginning of your career. If you are lucky enough, the team may have some specific roles that can somehow reflect where you are, but that's not part of the organisation structure. A little bit later, so as a beginning of this year, MS started to catch-up with the industry and tries to introduce Agile methodology to the Software Development. It's generally became the lead must do direction, that is, as usually it happens at multinational, have been overreacted and everything became agile, so people can get their political value out of it. But the implementation of this transformation is poor, people don't tend to follow the rules of Agile and that makes the whole stuff not working. The system of the compensation (salary+bonus) is tragic. You have practically no idea why are you getting what you are getting. There is no conversation about your needs, typically you are just told at the beginning of the year what will be your compensation. People who has no idea what are you doing (if they have heard about you at all), decides you compensation. They do not try to keep up with the industry, once you are there, I would say it does not even follows the inflation. Last year's review was the best I got, and I still didn't get any raise. You kind of loose your motivation after you find out, it does not effect how much do you achieve in you work, what your salary will be like. You probably will start to feel yourself not valued after a while. Another pain point for me, that the company directions are rather favored, than keeping good programmers. I wanted to relocate to NY, that I consistently communicated with the team and we figured out the expectations together. I have waited 2 years for this happen, continuously got good feedbacks about my work and was told that they really would be happy to get me there to the NY team as well. Last year's Q4 was bad for MS, a lot of budget cut that made me to wait 3 month more than the expectations we were talking about. Then an organisation structure change resulted the company mandatory relocations, that practically burned up the rest of the relocation budget before mine was even mentioned. They were rather let me go, then make somehow budget for it. As a last try, they tried to find for me a position in an another team in NY. We started to talk about about the details, agreed about some lower cost relocation, they made the position for me, then at the last point some committee decided not to approve, though the team had the budget. That was the last drop in the glass. The focus is usually on something else then it should be on. You are told that the number one priority to provide a stable and fast software, but when you are trying to build the foundation of that, people tend to concentrate on delivery rather. Though you may have a good view on how should things get done, it is hard to do that way if at every step you have to convince people don't have the expertise in the topic. You won't get the support from the management to agree on the good standards and make them kept. They will rather choose a way where there is less confrontation with the people, so everyone seems to be happy. Yeah, the consequence is a mess in the codebase. You can't have long-running plans, you always depend on the profit of the last quarter. Hiring strategy is horrible. The diversity is considered before the actual knowledge of the candidate, if they need to decide between two candidates. I kept seeing people hired, that I never thought would ever hit the minimum knowledge I thought would be required to be hired. The randomness of budget constraints leads to situation that the company keeps missing the opportunity to hire good candidates.