Fidelity Investments

Competitive benefits package. Flexible work schedule. Most people have good intentions. Seems to be a good enough place once you get to a ~Principal level, as the pay, bonus potential, and 401k contributions begin to stack up.

Pay is considerably below average for software engineers or tech more broadly.

Rising through the ranks can be difficult and incredibly frustrating, as there is a lot of politics involved.

You can go a lot farther doing mediocre work on side projects rather than outstanding work for your project team (which, by the way, typically has well-defined KPIs and revenue implications, unlike the one-off side projects).

Possibly depends on the business unit, but rarely feels like the work has substantial impact on society.

Can be a very slow process to adopt new technologies and paradigms.

Don't put project work in a black box. If someone is going above and beyond on their project work, they should not be further required to do often meaningless (in terms of business impact) side projects to get the nod for a raise or promotion.

This creates a dangerous culture where people will sacrifice their project work to gain exposure, while those who care about their project work will have to pick up the slack. It is not sustainable to then expect those people to further put time and effort into side projects as well; it will cause burnout, particularly for not much payout.

On that note, consider refining the compensation structure again. The base salary is almost laughably low when it comes to the tech field. While there is an abundance of great benefits, a lot of them do not apply to young professionals and go unused.

For example, as someone without a child and not expecting anytime soon, I would rather have more base pay than paid maternity/paternity leave or adoption assistance or anything of that nature.