Fidelity Investments

Nice cafeteria. Nice office space.

• Variable pay means you always leave a lot on the table if you decide to leave.
• Management is based on seniority instead of leadership values.
• Leaders don't focus on growing you or duplicating their efforts by instilling them in you; they just tell you how they want it.
• It feels like managers are graded on product deliverables, not team growth.
• Knowledge base documentation (Confluence without the AI summary feature) is an utter nightmare; nobody can put together a technical document.
• Most people have this way about them where they don't try to understand your question and jump straight to telling you what they think you should know. This is actually a big one; I get cut off all the time before I can even finish my question or thought experiment to paint them a picture, and they go off on something they think is helpful but isn't.
• Risk-averse, afraid to refactor or tackle tech debt if it touches too many things.
• Design choices oversimplify matters, and applications cripple with accidental complexity because the original model was insufficient.
• Design end-to-end solutions for everything rather than building composable tools (in the name of security/application isolation, safety), but this creates multiple points of failure because they copy and paste code instead of making robust, interoperable tools.
• Back ends are a Rube Goldberg; everyone is afraid of touching things because of this.

Hire people based on skill. Pay better for skill. Quality over quantity.

Seek diverse backgrounds from applicants from other tech companies. Listen to them. Stop hiring your same skin tone buddies.

Stop hiring doers and start hiring thinkers.