Swiss Re reviews

After some years in the company, it was very difficult to upskill in an expert role (it seemed to me that management pathways are much more supported compared to expert ones). I found it difficult to discuss tangible career goals that can lead me being promoted. There was still something missing and according to my line manager, I was not even in the promotion pipeline. Similarly to other corporates, working hard towards the promotion won't guarantee you any promotion unless it is signed off by some high manager who is at least 4 levels above and does not even know who you are and what you have accomplished. Pay raise is also very difficult to get, even after demonstrating more work than others. Annual salary reconciliation is just the announcement how much they are raising you the salary based on submitted end year review. There is no chance to negotiate your pay raise. Company has its data strategy defined around secure solution that in reality a platform provided and supported by Palantir. Although security is not a problem here, developer experience and overall transferability of skill working with this platform, are. There is almost no company in the world using this platform so you can not use it somewhere else. I had a privilege to be part of very skilled, professional and collaborative team. Unfortunately, when working with other teams outside of AI/data science, quality of software engineering and development in general was often poor. Lacking documentation, huge code base in which writing everything from scratch would be easier than refactoring. In some critical project, our team was used as fire fighters because there was lacking expertise in other teams.

Low growth, Toronto not treated as an ideal stategic location for data scientist in swiss re. EMEA is in the driver seat.