HSBC

My seven-month stint at HSBC was one of the weirdest episodes in my 20+ year career in IT. I started out with high hopes, HSBC being one of the largest banks in the world, but those hopes were quickly decimated by the company culture and the way HSBC's IT department operates.

First, for the good stuff:

• My team members were friendly, albeit that most of the conversation between them was in Cantonese. As a Gweilo, it is pretty hard to integrate, simply because you don't get involved in many discussions that are going on.
• My manager was also very easy-going. He did not really care when you showed up in the office as long as the work was done. Fair deal.

This effectively led to a good work-life balance, as during my time at HSBC, there was not that much pressure and I could actually enjoy quite a bit of free time after work. But that's about it when it comes to positives.

Now, the downsides. Where do I start?

First of all, there is the horrendous HSBC work culture. The whole IT department is extremely political and bureaucratic to the point of being absurd. The amount of paper pushing is just preposterous.

It is next to impossible to get anything done at all because even the smallest decision needs to be reviewed and approved by a plethora of managers. Management has absolutely no sense of direction, resulting in loads of time, effort, and money being wasted. When decisions are eventually made, they have a big chance of being cancelled, with once again loads of money going down the drain.

As far as I could tell, there were two kinds of people working in my environment.

The first type of employee was the one who was running around like crazy, filling out online forms, and being in conference calls all day long to get minor things done. Even the simplest things required them to jump through a hundred hoops, and even then, they were not sure they would get what they needed. My guesstimate is that those people were busy about 80% of the time with overhead and perhaps 20% doing something useful. It was simply mind-boggling.

The other type of employee was the one that had given up and really could not care less. They could be found playing games on their phones all day long and just sitting at their desks, or perhaps in the rather nice lounge area for extended periods of time. The absurd thing is that their managers knew they were doing nothing, but they did not care either. My perception was that I was basically looking at an entire hierarchy of people protecting their jobs.

The environment is an extremely stifling one with absolutely no prospect for career advancement.

You know, sometimes a retirement home is referred to as "God's Waiting Room." Well, HSBC looked to me like a "Retirement Waiting Room." Employees are just sitting there, spending countless hours looking clueless at computer monitors, just to collect their paycheck at the end of the month. After seven months, I gave up and resigned, lest I became a vegetating, monitor-staring person myself.

Get rid of the political culture. Let people actually work. Make sure that those who have a job at HSBC also have something meaningful to do.