Just a call center. I have worked previous jobs in awful call centers and thought that coming to Vanguard would be different. It is not. The only difference is the professional atmosphere. Everything else is driven by numbers and micromanagement. It is a phone mill basically. It is very very hard to move up in this company and very political (but then again it is like this at any company). Even when you do move up, salary gains are minimal for the amount of work you are given. I was hired in the middle of 2008 and after the market crash they stopped hiring (even though they could afford it) and the volume of work skyrocketed. They hire about 1/3 of the people they used to, to do the same amount of volume of work with the lowest paying salaries (comparative to other direct competitors like Schwab or Fidelity for example).
Within the last few years they got rid of a profit sharing bonus that everyone LOVED and replaced it with one where the company basically decides how much they want to give out (they say it is more aligned with how well the company does). They said this is what everyone wanted, but no one mentioned except for senior management that it was a good change. Every year I have been employed the company has seen growth in assets under management ($1.3trillion in 2008, to just under $2trillion as of 2012) and the bonus has been minimal at best.
Cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap. The healthcare benefits used to be AWESOME. Vanguard, however, like to lower the costs as much as possible at the expense of anything (salary, bonuses, how many people they hire, health benefits). The healthcare plan outside of the recent bonus change being the biggest. They only offer two plans now, and they are both high-deductible plans where the person pays for majority of their own care out of pocket. They put this under the guise that taking care of your own health will help you avoid 90% of health-related costs (this is true to a certain degree, but not to the extent they tried to justify the change with). TERRIBLE. Say goodbye to your bank account if you have to go to the hospital for an emergency.
You have to drink the koolaid or you looked down upon. After 4 years I have grown out of this company and just come to work to do a good job and then go home. You are looked down upon if you aren't involved in other activities. Just leave me alone and let me do my job which i was hired to do. I used to champion this company for its ethics (which today in the securities business is still the best), but over the course of time that I've been here they seem to continuously push the limits of paying attention to their employees and valuing them. That value has degraded over time and will continue to do so in the name of cutting expenses.
