Pros
Generous time off, 401k match, typical large company benefit bundle.
Cons
I've been misled by the "tech transformation." I was recruited out of state from a real tech hub and sold fool's gold. I am a highly qualified senior software engineer and am accustomed to working in shops that run a tight ship and value technology. M&T is a circus rife with staunch business folk who have been stuck in the same antiquated ways of working for decades. There exists not a single piece of decent engineering here but rather old, archaic, and embarrassing failed attempts to create things other organizations have done years ago. You'll be introduced to vendor-based projects running on life support that were slapped together by long gone contractors and be expected to maintain them with a smile. Engineering excellence will not matter here, nor your modern skillset or credentials. All that will matter is how well you can play the corporate game and the ability to appear busy and important. In other words, how much you can be a politician. Look forward to meetings all day where people do nothing but talk about doing cool new things but never actually attempt to do them. I’ve been subjected to “conversations” for months on end to start making software but it never happens. On the occasions where I’ve built something on my own to solve a problem in a modern way, those solutions were grossly misunderstood and met with resistance and skepticism from every angle. Microservices? Not understood. Containers? Not understood. Source control? A novel concept. The kicker of actually creating something that solves a problem here? You’ll be identified as a threat from the folks who would never attempt such a thing and ostracized from the herd. In over a year here, I have seen not a single honest tangible act to fulfill the “tech transformation” that is touted so regularly here - all talk - all pretend. I’ve felt like a sucker for accepting a position here with reasonable expectations. M&T is also playing copycat to other organizations, desperately stealing practices that worked in their competitors past travels. Look up “stack ranking” and “rank and yank” coined by GE and still used in some places and the toxic hunger games culture it brings. It’s here now and used in, no surprise, ways that are misunderstood and without regard to the cultural damage it causes. M&T is burning through senior engineering talent at an astronomical rate and betting the farm on hiring interns and “TDPs” to save the place, a technique also stolen by a huge competitor of theirs. Again, a practice that is misunderstood here and one which leadership expects a sudden teleportation into nirvana while skipping over all the hard work and commitment needed to meaningfully and sustainably get there. Soon M&T will be a daycare full of interns and leadership who misunderstands technology, and they’ll revert back to the starting line again and again because it failed like many of things here. You’ll be handed your Windows laptop and spend months trying to get past corporate proxies, password lockouts, feats of installing dev tooling that is near impossible, and a wealth of bureaucratic nonsense, only to sit on the sidelines watching your team participate in rituals of “working” on haphazard codebases to release a monthly change on a weekend that is laughable in relative progress. M&T spent decades disregarding technology and it shows in every facet of working there. I’ve never seen a place where technologists are regularly undermined by old guards and treated so poorly. I absolutely hate working here and cannot emphasize enough how truly disappointed I am.