Transamerica reviews

I was told I would be working on a new project that was essentially rewriting this old legacy code base written in visual basic. I stated specifically and repeatedly that I didn't want to work on that old legacy code written in visual basic, and that the only reason I accepted the position was to write the new stuff. Guess what happened? They put me exclusively on that old legacy code written in visual basic. I asked repeatedly to be taken off that project as it was not what we discussed, only to be told "oh we'll move you soon". I was still on the project after 11 months with no end in sight. Being a financial company, there are large amounts of regulations. TA doesn't streamline ANY of these so everything is slowed to a crawl. One line code changes take 2-3 months to get deployed. I didn't have write access to the TEST DATABASES! TEST! I had to go through change control to do a SQL update. IN TEST! I also saw multiple deployments take literally 8 hours. That process isn't in any way intuitive or streamlined. Oh and deployments are always outside of work hours, and sometimes on weekends, so that's a thing too. 8 extra hours of work on a Saturday because of inefficient processes. Thanks guys. Oh and what do you get for working 8 extra hours? A Bravo award! Which is basically a gift card. Thanks, that $50 gift card really makes up for a full days worth of extra work on a weekend. Management does NOTHING to change anything. We get emails all the time that are corporate jargon with 0 substance and all buzz words. Management is completely out of touch with their employees. TA is now replacing full time employees and contractors with offshore contractors to save money, so be wary, they do not care about you as an employee. Which was apparent from day one.

1. The General Ledger isn't live. It updates overnight, so you better hope you didn't make a mistake on your journal entries because you won't find out until the next day. 2. Too much is done in excel. Imagine have 50+ excel files (not exaggerating) all linking into each other. Imagine that of those 50+ files some are owned/maintained by other people/departments/etc (even your own files are subject to being changed by another person). Now imagine what happens if one of those other owners decides to add a column or row to one of their files or even delete a cell. You guessed it, everything blows up. Now imagine trying to explain to your manager why your file/files are pulling N/A or Errors when you didn't change anything. 3. Micro management. Even if the boss says they don't care how you perform a task don't believe them. If you do give it the college try, be prepaid to have to re-do everything later. 4. You need to get use to the fact that when you're wrong you're wrong, and when you're right you're wrong. 5. According to some managers, deadlines don't matter (unless it's a deadline that they've created). 6. Backstabbing, in fighting, and throwing people under the bus is common through out all levels (from interns to senior management). One manager even promotes it. With in my first week of employment I was told not to trust anybody (including management). People have intentionally not sent documents on time just to get back at others. 7. Stay far far far away from anything investment department related.