BlackRock

It's nice on your CV.

It's a golden-handcuffs, nice cushy job, chit-chatting with low-skill MDs and having coffee-chats with mostly young and exploited people fresh out of university. Most of their tech is built by a rotating door of cheap analysts and interns, which is why their platforms are so low quality.

While it's nice to mix and know new cultures, they also failed here. Recently they moved their businesses to India and Eastern Europe, but they already turned out to be famous for giving low pay in notoriously low-cost-of-living countries! Having the highest turnover and lowest retention in Gurgaon and Mumbai!

People in general are kind and well-behaved, the New York product kids being the exception.

Got to learn Azure off their back, and got a variety of other perks including a nice cash package we get upon being laid off.

Reverse-discrimination - terrible examples everywhere, where tenured individuals end up reporting to some diverse (women) new entry, because a low-attention Managing Director in NY liked her.

Scroll through their LinkedIn: English teachers, financially uncertified individuals, low-skill, no-certification individuals who all are suddenly Head of something, magically promoted to Director or Managing Director even though they have no backing history.

It was so bad that highly skilled financial engineering developers and portfolio managers just walked out. They couldn't tolerate the childish leadership and antics of some newly promoted 'product gods' – verticals that need very deep and very technical business and mathematical knowledge. These product people, their greatest achievement was fantasy-named squads.

At least part of their DEI strategy realized, as they reversed the discrimination against the non-diverse, so much so that entire organizations are headed by "diverse candidates" – their merit, no one knows. Good luck getting your reward after sacrificing your life, family, and mental health for this business if you aren't new and 'diverse'.

Constant threats of being laid off, unless you are in the newest fancy sector (at the moment, Bitcoin), a choice you have no control over, except your New York gods and their newly hired pets.

Low intelligence, low-skilled senior leadership who spend more time fly-fishing, golfing, and racing than taking care of their business and people. They spend more time acting like rock stars (really, there is such a ferocious cult of personality for some MDs, who only talk and do fireside chats).

Lots of product and agile, but their "agile" is nothing but FRAGILE FRAGILE FRAGILE. The newly hired Head of Whatever, Product Manager of This-and-That, Project-Something, read a Medium article on agile and enforced some childish game on serious professions who are 100,000x their value.

During the layoffs, people were so depressed, a truly dark, depressive, hopeless environment – unless you were friends with some new MD and working on the latest fad.

Avoid this pit: unless you like low pay, no career, and impossible competition against what race, sexual orientation, or gender looks good on their Twitter.

Unless you have a basic product certificate and are diverse – then join here.

You destroyed so many lives laying off people randomly, like you did the past year. I hope all these product-people, smooth-brained talkers, can run your financial platforms. Your investors will not be forgiving!