Fidelity Investments

Benefits (pension, bonus) are really excellent. Training opportunities are good. My advice would be to join the company, skill up on as much as you can (and you will have time to do it), then leave after a year.

Where to start?

A ridiculous amount of people work on small projects that, in any normal software house, would take 3 weeks but take 3 months at FMR.

The Ireland offices are pretty much treated as an offshore group. Work is allocated from the US, but Ireland is not seen as an equal partner.

You are expected to fill the time by coming up with "innovation" ideas, which basically means trying to convince the US partners to let you have more people, exacerbating the first issue, which is that there are too many people and not enough work.

Also, they have no clue what the function of a QA group is in an SDLC. As far as career growth, they expect testers to transition into "real" careers, i.e., management or automation developers.

Take some real metrics and see exactly how much (or how little) work your teams are really doing.

Upper management should be pushing to be an equal partner with us, not an offshore lackey.