Pros
• Good emphasis on gender and ethnic diversity in tech • Very good benefits • People are mostly nice and pretty relaxed • Work is easy • Work-life balance can be great • Compensation is okay
Cons
• Mind-numbing, uninteresting work • Work-life balance can be awful, with long hours and meetings at odd times of night • TONS of internal propaganda • Outdated tech stacks (super old RHEL, Python, Java, etc) • Very difficult to incorporate tech stack updates • Very bad developer environment, typically in resource-starved Windows VDIs or Linux VMs with low-level permissions (have to submit a formal request and wait several days just to get a five year old release of Eclipse) • Never-ending management changes, middle management layoffs, strategy and vision changes, and unclear or extremely superficial goals such as "be the best" • Job is largely integrating and configuring purchased products • Agonizingly slow CI/CD pipeline • Enormous process overhead; tons of engineering/development time lost to process requirements • Engineering is not a priority • You work for a soul-sucking, unethical, exploitative, and bloated financial institution