BlackRock

• I know this could vary by team, but my team is laid back and chill.
• You get to learn a lot about financial stuff, especially investing and money management (if you are open to learning).
• Good benefits, including unlimited PTO, 401k matching, and boost.

• Pay is not that good compared to tech companies. I wouldn't have complained if that at least increased (a little if not a lot) every year, but no. It would be the same for several years, and they don't care about your life changes, inflation, etc. EVERY YEAR they say the same thing: "oh, it's not been that good a year," even though the earnings are good.

• Promotion process is a huge mess. I saw people bootlicking senior management get promoted even though they are unworthy, and some talented and hard-working people ignored because they actually work and do not waste time talking BS and entertaining those senior management. This kind of culture is HIGHLY TOXIC, and it's high time people corrected it. People have taken cue and started working less and boot licking more. Also, there is no clear path or definition to promotion or any measurement scale for the criteria. It's just too abstract, and they expect you to already be doing the work of the role that you are trying to get promoted to. Why would I do that when I'm not getting paid for it yet?

• Developer experience sucks. You get all kinds of "security" crap installed on the computers that make them super slow for developers. If you don't trust software engineers to not click on stupid spam or get viruses onto the computers, why hire them in the first place? The dev process becomes SUPER SLOW because of thousands of background processes running and becomes super irritating, and you lose all the remaining motivation to code. How hard is it to have different policies for developers and non-developers?

Pay well. That will not only motivate existing engineers to do great things but also attract new talent that can make BlackRock the tech company it wants to be.

And please fix the promotion process. This will retain the talent who will not then feel like they can never progress their career here.

This is not just my view; I've heard this frustration from several people.