BlackRock

Depending on the group you join, you might learn a lot under a good manager and have a great professional experience, like I had for the first several years at the company under my first manager.

There are smart people. Your overall experience is kinda gonna be luck of the draw, but you could luck out. I made some really good friends there. Friendships that go beyond the work tenure.

• Rampant H-1B abuse. They hire people who don't have the concept of breakpoints or debugging as software engineers, often in senior positions. Those salaries should've gone to US-educated grads.

(The competent work visa holders are the most unfortunate ones, having to do multiple times the work on a fraction of the salary and stick it out for many years before they can jump ship.)

• Subpar hires leading to bad practices becoming the norm. Spaghetti code in production is the norm. Testing in production just became the norm. People will run scripts that bombard the company's own servers, and the whole thing always ends up being a blame game where people who did nothing wrong end up having to not only work more to clean up other people's messes but also somehow take the blame for it.

• This vicious loop leads to a toxic culture of blame casting, credit stealing, and offloading work to other people. Someone will make something that's not your problem your problem, and you need to do it, not as a favor, but to atone for a bogus problem that they created for you. Management repeatedly rewards those who screw other people to get ahead. Multiple complaints to management were not only unaddressed but furthermore covered up, unless employees go straight to HR.

• Competent people who have a choice keep leaving, and the workload gets distributed to the rest of the competent employees who can actually do the work, and they inevitably leave too. It started out as a domino effect, but in the past year or so has accelerated into a snowballing phenomenon.

Nothing that isn't common sense.

Hiring resources like a poor guy buying boots is more costly in the long run. Recruitment and training cost a lot more than retaining.

But realistically, the major-change ship has sailed. For the sake of friends who still work there: try swapping the 'everyone-drop-everything-and-listen-to-HR-telling-you-how-lucky-you-are-to-work-here' conference for an employee appreciation brunch, or just bagels. It costs one person's hourly wage rather than an email chain of people's, and is infinitely better for morale.