Politics, Politics, Politics. Politics are insane in this place. Senior management is often clueless about what is going on on the middle management level. It's a dog eat dog world and every manager goes out of their way to defend their turf. Forget team work - you are lucky if you don't get yelled at for responding to the incorrect email to the incorrect team. The amount of maneuvering I had to do to get my job done on a day to day basis was not just frustrating - it was unbearable.
If you are in the index business - you are in the privileged territory. If you are on the Risk side you are a second class citizen. MSCI doesn't really know what to do with Barra and Riskmetrics so they struggle quite a bit.
Current CTO is a very competent individual but some of his lieutenants are subpar. They run around trying to put the next killer project on their resume and earn an extra bonus without any regard to what their antics are doing to the business. They have their pet projects that they guard very closely so if you get on one of these A-teams your comp will probably be great for a while. Until the whole project inevitably gets cancelled and you will be a pariah.
All of this insanity has taken its toll. Morale is at all time low in R&D, a lot of senior people I've spoken to were planning a departure sometime in the near future.
