Fidelity Investments

The work is extremely easy. They have good benefits: 401k and profit share. They have everything at the company that you can think of as far as technology, so lots to learn for entry-level people. It has a decent corporate culture that encourages a good attitude and free speech.

Fidelity lacks technical leadership as a whole and does not value it. They value attitude over all else, which means they hire people they like and contract out technical folks. They are not lean and Agile, with lots of bloat and middle managers. The environment is extremely political, and they accomplish very little. It's extremely hard to get anything done with all the bureaucracy and meetings. There are lots of non-technical folks blowing hot air and not enough GOOD developers. 90% of their developers are not employees but contractors, and turnover is very high. As far as full-time employees go, Fidelity hires low-level tech folks who have a good attitude but lack experience, which further exacerbates and compounds not getting things done. There are lots of silos and teams that only care about themselves. Cross-team communication is probably the poorest I have ever experienced in my career. To add to it all, folks regularly switch teams, and so you lose people you trained, and you have to start over again. As a whole, in my opinion, it's not a great environment to write and test code in. Everything is always breaking, and getting things fixed takes days, not hours, while your whole team is idle. This encourages idleness and apathy.

At Fidelity, it is extremely hard to attract talent because good developers will not put up with the bureaucracy.

Good developers enjoy getting things done, and the pay is better elsewhere.

In general, I've never experienced such high turnover at a company. Teams seem fractured and siloed, with not enough emphasis on innovation but more or less following the status quo and keeping the show going.

Cross-team communication is the worst I've ever experienced.