It's all a front. This is a self-serving organization that refers to itself rightly so as "the cult on the hill." This is the name others gave Ken Fisher's first office in Woodside, but it is still a fitting title for an organization that overlooks every big elephant and continues to operate as if it were 1963. The leadership is incompetent. The middle management is brutal, leading like dictators, over sheepish victims that it controls with politics and fear.
They talk openly about "drinking the Kool Aid" and caution about those who do not drink the Kool Aid. If you don't drink, they will take you down fast. Therefore, the remnant are career Fisherites, including its CEO, Damien, who started there as a twenty something, and now 20 years later, knows nothing else but the warped culture he grew up in. When he goes around asking people how things can be improved, he is deaf and doesn't understand change management. All he knows is the propaganda he was raised on and what he spouts off now, so it is all a game face for everyone there.
The next downturn in the market will take down the firm. The organization is not capable of change. If someone talks of change, everyone else circles around ready to stone you, if not literally then at least with attacks.
Human Resources is actually the antithesis of what we know of as HR today; they actually take out any naysayers or those who do not "fit the culture" very much like a cult, while there can be verbal abuse and assault reported and they will protect the aggressor while taking down the victim. I have never seen anything so bizarre in my entire career.
The environment is terrible. People swear at you and point fingers. You will be in the cross hairs of blame for stuff you never had anything to do with and could have never predicted or avoided. The only people who stay are those who have no other options or who grew up here and do not know any better. This is hell, people. Get out! The work life balance is terrible; you are required to work 50 hours a week with no flextime and no flexibility. You can work longer too. You will not be given adequate tools, software, or resources to do your job. Fisher is cheap about everything as if they were broke, but they have valets outside not utilized just in case a client in a Ferrari comes over one day on a blue moon.