Competitive salary but frustrating and isolating
Pros
- Competitive salary - Decent benefits - plenty of personal days, company/floating holidays, and PTO; company culture encourages taking time off as needed. - Business Analysts, Product Owners, and other Subject Matter Experts are knowledgeable and helpful. - On-Site mental wellness therapist / counselor that you can visit for free
Cons
- Increasingly strict company-wide RTO mandate despite international teams. I was originally full-time remote but forced to become hybrid at the risk of losing my job. I was late to team meetings as a result of being forced to commute to the office. I spent most of my time in the office working with team members in other time zones. Network connectivity was slower at the corporate office than at my home office due in-office network congestion and legacy corporate networks. - Laptop provisioning is a nightmare due to conflicting IT policies between BNY and its subsidiaries. It takes weeks or even months to acquire the correct permissions and software for day-to-day work. I knew a summer intern who spent half of their internship working with IT just to finish setting up their BNY laptop. - Organizational structure is unclear; teams are siloed with little if any knowledge sharing. I needed a cheat sheet to remember where exactly I was in the organization. - Internship programs are poorly executed and treated as an afterthought by management. Managers who actively participate int these programs are penalized for not spending more time on "real work". Some interns are assigned to remote teams, and as a result they effectively get two managers (one for their local office and one for their remote team) which is not ideal for tracking performance. - Agile adoption is a joke. Despite a massive push towards a "Platform Operating Model", most teams still lack scrum masters. Daily standups last hours. Retrospectives happen once or twice a year and no one follows up on action items. - Adoption of AI is creating more problems than it solves; developers are rated based on mandated use of AI rather than how effectively they do their job; teams are wasting their time on developing agents for the sake of "having AI". Teams are skipping or minimizing code reviews and leaning on AI to review their code instead. - Dev teams do little to break the ice resulting in a culture of isolation. My team had a weekly virtual water-cooler meeting for a while, but the manager discontinued it because "we had more important things to do". You can spend years working at this company and never meet anyone on your team in person. - Production bug reporting is disorganized, with no formal process for bug reporting or triage other than "Someone complained in Microsoft Teams."
