Bank of America

Most roles are low stress compared to big tech or startups.

Low expectations on most teams.

The brand name can help with future jobs, as long as the hiring manager was not a previous employee of the bank.

If you work 50-60 hours as a contractor, you will get paid for 40 hours. You won't get paid for holidays. It's rare for the bank to approve working over 40 hours, but it's common that it will be expected from you.

The bank severely hinders developer productivity. They've been slow to allow new libraries and tools. The official policy is to be 5 years behind the market on technology, but it's closer to 10 years behind.

The bank treats contractors the same as full-time employees, without the benefits of job security, healthcare, vacation, stock options, etc. You're not allowed to take on non-bank work while working a contract role. You are expected to follow corporate work policy and hours. You are generally expected to attend the same number of meetings as full-time employees. You're expected to attend social events put on by managers. But you can still be dropped with no severance and no notice, whereas it can take years to fire a full-time employee.

Shortly before my last contract ended, it was announced that contractors must work from the office with their cameras on for a minimum of 8 hours each day. It was 2 half-days a week during my interview, 3 half-days by the time I started, and when it ended, it was not only 5 full days, it was 5 days with your camera on the entire time. That sounded miserable to me.

Bank policies will regularly interfere with your ability to work, and you're on your own to figure out why a system is blocking you from being allowed to push your code. Something as simple as renaming a directory in a project can lead to months of refactoring to comply with the latest black-box Git security rules. Since contractors are used to implement a lot of the security infrastructure, you'll often run into issues where no one knows how or why scans are blocking your pushes after meeting with half a dozen teams.

The bank promotes a "leadership" culture, which sounds good in theory, but in practice, it's a culture of blaming instead of taking ownership. This leads to managers creating difficult-to-follow processes that solve no problems but allow that manager to blame teams for not following their random process and "stand out" to higher-level managers by creating meetings to discuss the non-problem and "who is responsible" instead of a more constructive meeting on how we could solve the problem.

Culture is extremely meeting-heavy. I would spend a minimum of 2 hours in meetings every day, and some days I'd be in meetings the entire day. Meetings would start as early as 6 a.m. and as late as 4 p.m. Less than half the meetings I was required to attend were relevant to the work I was doing.

Skipping meetings as a contractor, regardless of if it's during hours they'll pay you for, is frowned upon.

Before COVID, I enjoyed working from the office. Everyone had their own cubicle or desk, and cleaners would clean each work area. After COVID, they implemented a hybrid office environment where very few people have their own desk. One day you could get a desk next to programmers, and the next, you could get one in between two phone support people. The desks and keyboards are not cleaned at the end of the day, so it was common to be stuck with a desk covered in crumbs, dead skin, and occasionally sweat/grease and need to clean it yourself every day.

Another part of the hybrid office is mini PCs that you use to remote into a VM. They don't work very well, and it would commonly take 30-45 minutes to log into my VM from the office. To work from home, they provide Chromebooks, or you can remote in using your personal computer. If you can't log into your VM, you can't work.

Despite forcing an RTO policy on contractors and employees, most teams are spread out among many cities, so there is no enhanced collaboration happening because of their policy.

The contracting firms the bank uses do not offer reasonable health insurance plans. The only plan I had access to was nearly $2,000 per month and didn't cover the ER or primary care visits for one person.

Stop with the RTO nonsense for roles where people sit in front of a computer screen all day. There are only downsides to forcing the policy on all teams.

Remove bureaucratic processes that serve no purpose. Foster a leadership culture based on taking ownership for problems and making incremental improvements over promoting who blames the loudest.

Start hiring contractors on a C2C basis. If you're not willing to hire someone full time, allow them to use an LLC instead of a firm that takes 40% of their earnings. That extra 40% is enough to compensate for the risk of not having severance, job stability and the ability to choose better health plans than the firms you use offer.