Morgan Stanley reviews

Indoctrination, they hire grads and interns with little or no experience and drill into them that this is a great place to be. After which it is impossible to carry a healthy self-critical conversation with them. The propaganda posters are the worst with their graphs of unlabelled axis touting how great the company is. Institutionalized workforce, they want to mould you to be a "Morgan Stanley" employee. With as little transferable skills as possible. Build everything in house to keep people from acquiring real skills (they even went far enough attempt to build their own programming language). A lot of the younger crowd don't realise this until it is too late. Dull eyes. Lack of talent, the bar is set so incredibly low that you almost have to dig for it. Technical skill of the average programmer is mediocre at best. But their boasting is through the roof, most suffer from a serious case of the Dunning–Kruger effect. Don't even start me on the strats, that sorry bunch of hacks. Overall lack of motivation, no body cares about anything. All talk and no action. People have meetings about having meetings about other meetings and then they go home. Nothing gets done. And if by accident something is done, it is done in the absolutely the worst lacklustre way possible. Political nightmare, nobody seems to be doing any work as they're all busy pointing fingers blaming everyone else, sorry I meant "escalating". People actively inject themselves into conversations that have nothing to do with them. Everybody is scrambling for their own little intern/grad/indian to "manage". Going to team/dept drinks is nothing short of a sickening brown-nosing session which most managers lap up (as most deliberately surround themselves with yes-people). Severely backwards when it comes to technology and software. They're still running on WindowsXP in 2012. Nothing gets upgraded until it is already out-dated, which is a favourite complaint on the in-house mailing list. Actively hostile environment to software developers. Development environment crash constantly (i.e. Visual Studio and Eclipse) due to over-the-top restrictive access controls and antiquated OSs. C++ devs have it the best but only because they use Textpad or something even more primitive. Computers are slow, software is slow, people are slow, EVERYTHING IS SLOW!

Teams and experiences of employees vary greatly across the company. If you're not a developer, you're less valuable. Culture where bullying is the norm. Racism and sexism is normal. A manager on one of the product teams has used the n word multiple times and no one did or said anything. A coworker was referred to as "the asian girl" and brought it to HR. HR did nothing. Your performance will be compared to people who live at work. There are developers who work 12-15 hours a day, every day. They will be given advancement opportunities, you will not (unless you are willing to sacrifice this amount of time). The average salary increase (yearly) will be about inflation. Don't expect a career here. Some of the managers are awesome. Some of them are bad. Some of them are terrible. The company moved from disorganized to chaotic. Your motivation is fear and anger. Nothing else.