Pros
It is a paycheck, and you can earn decent money from OT if you are a Senior Associate or below. There are great managers on certain teams that acknowledge their team’s efforts and that promote people pretty well. Work-from-home is allowed and encouraged by certain teams, and many people even spend most of the week working remotely. This benefit is certainly helpful for those with long commutes. There are also plenty of friendly people throughout the company despite the low morale within many departments. Working with team members in another country, even through remote communication, does provide insights into another culture. Despite the controversy with offshoring, I have found my offshore team members to be friendly and to be just as capable as onshore members once they have been brought up to speed. Any differences in work quality is mostly due to inexperience with specific procedures or clients within this firm as some onshore members have been working in their roles for multiple years. Of course, there have been issues especially with teams being overburdened with training and client complaints in regards to the drop in experience level on teams, but honestly, clients have had plenty to complain about even before this transition. If you are fine with working in investment servicing at a custodian bank, then State Street is likely the better place to be over its competitors in terms of work flexibility and benefits. The company has a good amount of networking groups and social events.
Cons
If you are in Global Services, then the work is very tedious, and you will become well acquainted with copying and pasting. The teams are also broken down into narrow silos, which limits opportunities and creates frustration in getting resources. Adding in tensions or lack of communication between teams, the situation certainly exacerbates issues with work quality. Many teams rely on offshore contractor teams that are given the grunt work and even narrower tasks. As they are considered contractors, they miss out on the benefits given to regular State Street employees. These factors cause high turnover within their teams which places heavier workloads on the teams reliant on them. This situation has been causing frustration throughout the company, yet management is somehow still confused as to why the contractor teams have been performing poorly. The workload for many teams is heavy due to delays in resources caused by the dependencies mentioned above combined with low staffing levels and the fact that multiple clients still expect work delivered on schedule. This may be nothing new to the corporate world, but with the mind-numbing work, it certainly takes away time that can be better spent for all of those involved. Restrictions due to the sensitivity of financial information causes so many headaches due to access issues to certain applications or resources. The reliance on macros to pull information does not help this situation as often my team gets stuck not being able to pull data due to an access restriction. Also, macros become useless when data sources are changed or when they become obsolete, and a manual workaround is often needed. Good luck getting something resolved that cannot be done remotely through the offshore call centers. The elephant in the room at this company has been the low morale due to layoffs or “redeployments” from offshoring, due to heavy workloads as mentioned above and due to general disconnect between upper management’s decisions and the rest of the employees. Again, this is not something unique to State Street, especially within its industry, but does not make the situation any less of a con. Working in the Global Services division, you are far away from the actual investment decision-making processes and tend to get pigeonholed into operations and fund accounting roles if you want to leave. If you have dreams of working in an interesting industry or working in an investment management role, then look to avoid or at least minimize your time here. If you do not take initiative to learn anything beyond your daily tasks, then you can expect to be in a tough place within the workforce in the long-term.