Fidelity Investments

Benefits are nice, and there are a lot of really awesome people to work with.

I have a lot of respect for the senior management and the direction that they want to take the company in terms of technology. That said, the middle and upper management is too busy fighting among themselves to actually make the company better. There is a lot of political in-fighting that seems to bleed down to the people on the ground floor, which makes working with teams outside your own team a struggle.

Technical transformation is hard and is always a struggle. If you actually want a team/group/product to succeed in creating advanced technology systems, you have to give them time to change, cut back on business demands while the transformation is happening, and allow them to take on risks that could very well disrupt business as usual. Being afraid and/or unwilling to take risks only stunts the transformation process and ultimately works against you.

In addition, there are a lot of political battles that continue to plague the company. More often than not, there are VPs and SVPs making decisions based on what is best for themselves instead of what is best for the company. Almost all of these individuals are greatly lacking in technical skills and often make technical decisions based on buzz words or whatever they "heard was good". This creates an environment that enables these SVPs and VPs to push these technical decisions onto their associates in a blanket pattern rather than letting the teams decide what is best for themselves.

An example of this are decisions like "everyone must migrate to and use Java or AngularJS" when some teams have already built product lines based in .NET or other technologies. Another example is "everyone must migrate to and use the same requirement, build, and deployment tools (Jira, Jenkins, and uDeploy)". While I understand a top-level desire of wanting to minimize what tools and languages teams across the board are using, it is highly unrealistic and reckless to throw away work that has already been completed and talent that has been developed simply because it doesn't fit into the cookie-cutter plan that a non-technical person came up with.