BNY reviews

the biggest challenge is trying to deal with supervisors and management who are constantly sending themselves and members of the group instant messages telling us what we are doing wrong. It's a tool I think they're abusing and not creating a good atmosphere.

- what good is the 3 months training when they don't pair you up with departments/managers that actually leverage these skills? we learned about java, spring etc, yet i didn't get to use any of these until I leave the company for my current job. They train you like a developer but use you like a offshore support staff. - the training covers a lot of topic, but mostly covers a lot of topic to a shallow extent. YET the manager i was paired up expect me to be able to handle BXP (the internal platform) like an experienced resource, when we covered the topic for maybe 2 days in training. (of course the manager deserves most of the blame for this unrealistic expectation even though he claim to have been misinformed, because even if we had spent most or the entire training period on this, a college recruit is not going to be able to develop on the internal platform like an experienced resource with years of coding at the company -- and frankly if i could, would you still be paying me what you were paying me?!!!!) - but maybe the training dept could've communicated with the future dept better on the expectations, or paired ppl better. ----------- which brings me to point 3, the biggest con of my experience, was by far my manager. this has to be broken down to multiple parts. 3.1 When I mentioned unrealistic expectation above, I wasn't kidding. For the first few weeks I've been at his department, his instruction to me consists of 3 steps: 1. read it up; 2. figure it out; 3. teach it back to me. 3.2 When he can't meet deadlines or things get difficult on conference calls, he conveniently "forgets"/"not at all recall" things that he has explicitly said in the past, and throws people under the bus at any signs of trouble. 3.3 Ok this is half him and half the company, but I gonna count this on him because he knows how much (or how little) I get paid, so it's pure bull**** that he expect from me something that he should expect from someone paid twice as much as I did, be it experience level, willingness to work over time, availability late night and weekends. 3.4 Again this is half him and half the company, but omg the politics. Office politics are everywhere, but at my current job, my manager deals with it with external teams and never once throw the whole politics bs at his own developers. my ex-manager is another story. it was just a pain to put up with the politics within the group itself. no one ever takes any responsibility for themselves (modeled after the manager of course), everyone always throws everyone else off the bus at the first sign that makes them panic for themselves (and they panic a lot). I know this isn't the case with all the groups in bnym, my friend got matched up with a very nice group - she learns nothing and does no development, which is why she had to leave before I did, but at least the people in her group were nice. ergo I count this one on my ex-manager still. 4. While I in particular had an unfortunate experience, what I've found in general among the people from the training program is that, this is a job you might like if you're 50-something looking to retire. There's stability. But very little room for growth. If you are a young person out of a good college with aspirations, you might find waiting-for-retirement-with-people-decades-your-senior-yet-probably-the-same-level-as-you just a bit, what should i call it, soul-sucking. 5. Pittsburgh salary kinda sucks for CS people in general. The cost of living isn't THAT low considering downtown parking or downtown rental (it's low if you buy a house - again, good for older people, not good for young ones). If you have a cs degree at a target school, go for any coastal cities, they don't cost much more but will pay a lot more.