BlackRock

All the pros are actually connected to working in eFront, which was acquired by BlackRock in 2019.

The vibe in eFront is great; people are very sincere, open-minded, and always willing to help.

The Belgrade office is located in the city center.

The company encourages employees to apply for other job openings if they're unhappy with what they do at the moment.

It's a great place to start a career or take on a new role, since for junior-level positions, it's more important that a person is willing to learn and shows the potential to do so than to know every single thing right away.

Ever since eFront was acquired by BlackRock, it feels as if we lost our closeness. The number of management tiers has doubled compared to eFront, and you don't feel your contribution counts at all on the company level.

Technology is now worse than it was before, since we're obligated to use really poorly-performing internal communication tools. There are way too many unnecessary compliance courses not related to the department you're working on.

As for the Java development part of the story, there's a lot of ancient (monolith) code. New things are coming along, but it's going really slowly, since clients need stability.