GIC reviews

No worklife balance. Appalling workplace bullying from many quarters including VPs/SVPs in HR, and MD level in some departments. Culture of sycophants and yes men. There is no healthy discussion because people are too afraid to question bad ideas from leaders, so bad ideas from leaders are blindly implemented and not well thought through. Business owners who are not technology professionals are the ones to make decisions about technology investments. If you rightly wouldn't let non-investment professionals make decisions about which financial investments GIC puts money in, why would you let non-tech professionals decide which tech systems GIC buys? Non-tech business owners do not know how to think about tech adoption or how to realise business value from tech. They make ill-considered decisions based on fancy UI and functionality they heard about, and do not consider other important factors such as the capabilities of existing systems which can meet their needs with some reconfiguration/upgrades, the already-fragmented end user experience and lack of time to use more new systems, scalability of the new system, compatibility with other existing systems, post-implementation support and maintenance models/costs, vendor maturity, whether the Tech Department has the right skillsets and capacity to implement and support new systems post go-live. Advice from the Tech Department (to leverage existing systems for example) fall on the deaf ears of business owners who are fixated on launching new systems to boost their careers and meet their personal KPIs. Little to no business value is realised from such new systems which become white elephants with low usage and are decommissioned after just a few years. The hidden costs in terms of time, manpower and money that went into the implementation and post go-live support/maintenance are unjustifiable. At a time when most technologically-mature companies are moving towards tech consolidation, GIC is moving in the opposite direction because business owners making tech investment decisions are not experienced tech professionals, and they do not respect the inputs of the tech SMEs. Imagine if non-investment professionals make decisions about which financial investments to put GIC's money in based on what they feel or hear from their circles or vendors! The country will soon be in financial ruin. Giving non-tech professionals the final say in tech investments is just as bad and a recipe for disaster that has led to a highly fragmented system landscape with multiple overlapping duplicate systems and low user adoption. Even adding head count to the Tech Department requires agreement from the business departments that the manpower costs are charged back to. Since the business departments do not understand the true scope of work and resist when the Tech Department tries to educate them, getting the correct headcount is a struggle and some teams in the Tech Department that directly support the business departments are chronically under-resourced. Unrealistic expectations from business owners about implementation timelines and scope of work exacerbate the problem, leading to burn out and high turnover in the Tech Department, which the outgoing CTO and previous MD of Tech (who left after just 2 years in GIC) 'explained' away as the effect of a good job market. Apparently the job market has been stellar all throughout the pandemic. Leaders at GIC have a tendency to explain away issues so they do not need to have difficult but necessary conversations with their peers in other departments. With new org changes that removed the CTO position, there may be even less Tech influence and representation at the leadership level. The new Tech MD seems nice enough with the right experience ,but has his work cut out for him. Here's hoping he can turn things around.

Toxic culture instil by mid level managers to blame everyone else for their own lack of foresight. Lack of experience in both processes and controls, especially from the security and risk managers. There’s consistent bullying which always covered with reasons that does not make any sense. Public shaming is consistently demonstrated but labelled as a sharing session. Bias is a norm. Minor issues are frequently snowballed into mountains to score. The culture is to award highlighting such issues to senior management, even from the same manager’s team. Mid level Managers lack leadership skills and manage the team by rank. Trust is not there. No integrity within the team. Every man for his own.