-Middle-management is not concerned about the wellbeing of their employees.
-Business partners are extremely conservative in their approach and often under-qualified for their positions based on lack of experience with digital products.
-Advancement in the organization is purely based on personal relationships as directors, and executive directors never directly review work.
-There are very talented designers in SATX, but they are not many which makes finding opportunities for mentorship very difficult.
-The home office is a brutalist corporate hellscape
-Due to high levels of bureaucracy and bloat it can be extremely difficult to implement relatively simple changes
-USAA is not in a good position to tackle the current challenges it faces, and it not changing quickly enough to overcome these problems - the longer this goes on the less relevant they will become in all of their businesses
*Takeaway: There really are a lot of opportunities to do good work in CDO, but unless you absolutely have to live and work in SATX you can do much more with much less effort at another company which will actually be relevant in 20 years.