- Stability extends to advancement and salary potentials; advancement was uncommon, even for high-achievers
- Very bureaucratic across all areas: project management is split throughout myriad divisions, all tech (even non-production software) must be whitelisted to be used.
- As a side effect, political contests between different divisions exist
- Also, projects tend to advance slowly, due to dependencies on other divisions and/or software approvals
- Technology is outdated and decaying (common problems in many large financial companies)
As a large corporation whose industry is not technical, Vanguard does not fully understand what role it wants for its full-time devs.
Vanguard's position in the industry is, simply, "to be the Wal-Mart of investing": high-value (though low costs and consistent returns), accessible to the public, and very efficient in operation. As of this review, they are succeeding wildly, with trillions of dollars in investments. This model is based on being conservative with money and not taking risks, which means that Vanguard tends to follow other companies only after success has been proven.
If you work in tech at Vanguard, you will likely be working on either their Java-based web servers, or their COBOL and SQL based data center. There are rare occasions where a project works with new tech. The tech direction is primarily maintenance and stability for the existing codebases.
On a personal note, I left Vanguard because my roles had started to shift away from software development and into project management for other divisions in the company and its outsourced teams. I had a bad experience where a simple project (roughly 1,000 lines of Java midtier code) was outsourced, and took 4 months to complete with the additional overhead.
