The exodus continues in Stamford - Vice President NatWest Group Employee Review

The workforce in the US has, and still is, being reduced drastically and continuously. If you look at the Warn notice list on the CT State website you will see that over the last few years and right up to the current date, they have been cutting jobs in batches of 30-50 or so typically once every month. The building was half empty when I was there and UBS has now moved into two floors. It was clear this branch had and more positive times in the past. The continuous exodus affected the behavior of staff and influenced the business decisions as people fought strategically and flexed their muscles in order to demonstrate their importance. However, there were some exceptions to the rule who just continued to roll their sleeves up and got with the job. I think there were also frustrations that cuts didn't seem to be happening in the UK offices at quite the same level as in the US, and that this was unfair. During the time I worked there management had not yet figured out a strategy on how to improve moral or provide any justifications for why staff should choose to stay. Most of IT headcount had already been moved to lower cost centers. Typically for every one position in the US there were multiple replacements (usually about three) hired in the low cost location to equate. However, usually they were of a lower level of experience and the timezone differences and sometimes language barriers did not help. The level of knowledge and standard of work coming from the lower cost centers, with a few exceptions, was poor and in my opinion would not provide value in the long term. Many times I had to deal with support teams in other locations who did not respond, could not understand English, or did not have any technical knowledge or in fact know anything about the system or technology they were supporting. Sometimes development teams I had to work with would say "we cannot do this", even though the request was, in my opinion, not particularly technically challenging. The level of bureaucracy was the worst I have ever witnessed. To get access to systems or to co-ordinate work with other teams took vast amounts of electronic paperwork, persistent follow-up, and escalation. The majority of emails to request access or help from other teams either went into black holes, or required persistent reminders and escalation to get actioned. To get the level of access required to do my job took several months after joining and many hours of persistent effort., and this was very frustrating. When working on projects sometimes arbitrary dates or goals were set just to please a manager or fit in with what was in a document. I think that sometimes developers and analysts lost sight of the goals they were trying to achieve, and were more focused on sticking to poorly designed project plans and arbitrary paper trails or documentation. One manager once said to me that he knows that it doesn't make sense for me to do something, but "If we need to tick a box on a document, we will". It was hard to believe that it could be any worse, but if anything required interaction with RBS Group staff or their systems then the level of bureaucracy rose to even more ridiculous levels. For the most part, the technology stack is a little behind the times.They are one or two versions behind the latest and are still using outdated front-end technologies and frameworks. Some of the internal applications were some of the most poorly designed, bad quality user interfaces I have ever seen. Some didn't work at all, and I can't believe how they got through any QA. There was limited budget. No travel to other offices with very few exceptions (mostly from the UK, not from the US, which caused some frustrations). Even the paper, pens, and other stationery was taken away from conference rooms, and we were told if we needed these things we needed to buy and bring our own. There was no real work-from-home guidelines or policy and it was generally discouraged.