1. Low salaries even though they seem to think they are competitive. They are not. Companies like Capital pay way more with better benefits and work life balance
2. Long hours (especially any finance job). Expect to work 12 hour days, weekends and holidays (like July 4). Walking into the CPE office on a weekend is just like walking in during a weekday, except people are dressed down. No work life balance. Several black out dates surrounding month and quarter ends where you can not take a day off.
3. Little employee appreciation. Expect the occasional good job email from CFO or invitation to bare bones happy hour in the kitchen which will end at 7pm even though you are expected to work until 8pm.
4. Work culture is every man for himself and throw people under the bus. This attitude is rampant here, I've never seen anything like it. Very poor intra-department understanding and communication. No one understands what anyone else does. You will undoubtedly get rude emails from other departments. When something goes wrong, everyone gets their blame stick out instead of working together to solve problems.
5. High turn over which management thinks is normal - it's not.
6. Zero accountability for bad managers (and there are plenty); you will never win against a manager here, no matter how inept he/she may be.
7. Caged in with no natural sunlight if you're in CPE building.
8. Zero (not a single person in the past 5 years) mobility from back to front office. I've never seen a firm culture that has such a strict wall up between their front office and the rest of the firm. They used to even do separate Christmas parties for the Front Office.
9. 20% pay cut when they 'promote' you from hourly to salary, they won't compensate you for the OT you will be losing
10. Operations departments are very cheap when it comes to ordering dinner despite them wanting you to work late hours.
11. Executive management (CFO) has unrealistic deadlines and expectations of departments. Orders to work holidays and weekends comes from here. Not sure why someone who can't articulate a few grammatically coherent sentences in front of an audience is in this position.
12. No encouragement of additional learning or expanding your skill set. They pay for the CFA only if you pass, ridiculous. Management probably understands there are no opportunities for a CFA here.
