TIAA reviews

If you look at reviews from other areas within the company, the common theme is that the systems are antiquated. If you work in IT, and aren't of a particular ethnic background, then you know how messed up things are. First, let's talk about the former CTO. All her town-hall meetings contained nothing but fluff, and she couldn't wait to bolt and let others handle the real topics. How she moved up the ranks is beyond me, and really is an indictment of the very top layers of this company. Then they replaced her with another fellow, and belongs to a special ethnic group within TIAA's IT area. Of course, those people are hands off. When I first joined, I saw managers there that survived 10, 15, 20 and in one case 30 years. My first thought was "wow.. this place must be great" only to realize that these managers didn't have the skill-set to flip burgers, let alone be managers in an IT department. I'll explain through 2 stories how dysfunctional this place was. My first manager , I had a 1:1 with him, and of course, everything I did sucked. I was a director in a previous company, but to him I was a screw-off because I took a relaxed attitude towards a number of high-visibility projects. I've done the work countless times in the past, so I had complete control of all aspects of the project, which, because of his total lack of skills, perceived this as me not caring. He would continuously threaten the group that we were going to lose our jobs, which leads me to question: how does someone like that survive that long, and what does it say about the company's "ethics" that they claim they hold in such high regard ? Well, this fellow was replaced by another guy who was supposedly an author and brought in from one of his buddies. As it turns of, he authored some book on some deprecated features of a software stack we were using. How he was an author is a complete mystery because his emails were so poor and disjointed, there was no possible way he could have penned a single paragraph of anything. In one years time, I literally spoke to him (with actual words) about 5 times. This gent was then given choice projects and he brought to his team all his favorites. So, in summary, the cons of this place are many. From the hypocrisy of upper management regarding "Ethics", to favoritism and out-right discrimination within IT (just look at the ethnic make-up of IT), working at TIAA was hands-down the worst place I've worked for.

The wealth management side of the company has become much more sales focused. When I first started working in the wealth management division of TIAA-CREF in 2007 it was primarily focused on the client experience and by the time I left the main objective was bringing in new assets. It became a "what have you done for me lately" environment and from what I have heard from employees that are still there it has stayed that way with the asset growth goals getting larger and larger every year.