Pros: Benefits (401k match, 4 weeks vacation upon hiring, pension, etc.) Competitive starting salary for new grads. Generally receive a yearly bonus. Co-workers - most are helpful and friendly. Immense amounts of internal training available.

Cons: Poor compensation policies: promotions don't guarantee raises, and it's rare to get your salary reviewed. This leads to no reason to take on more responsibility. ADVICE: Negotiate your highest salary at hiring. Poor performance review practices: They still use forced ranking. Objectives and feedback meetings are just checklist items for managers to complete. A lot of bureaucracy, and it is getting worse. The "controls" environment goes overboard and causes most development work to be more difficult and take longer than necessary. Risk teams often don't understand technology or how systems work together, complicating the development and maintenance of applications. Poor and disorganized project planning, full of bureaucracy, causes tech debt to go unaddressed.

Pros: J.P. Morgan is a big company, and it depends on what department you work for. The experience might be slightly different. I have worked with several organizations within JPMC. In general, things move at a slow pace, and there are a lot of processes to get things done. Tech organizations tend to be a little bit relaxing and offer good work/life balance. I usually worked 40 hours/week and was barely asked to work on weekends. JPMC is trying hard to mimic tech culture, but this will take years to completely change JPMC bureaucracy and work politics.

Cons: Culture is really awful here for tech. Too much paperwork and process is required to get things moving in general. Everyone has specific roles and responsibilities, so working with different teams could take forever to get things done. For example, like changing a small icon on a UI page, it would take weeks to get done. You create a ticket to UI > Design > BA > DEV. You also work with an outdated tech stack (Who still uses ES5, JDK5, or J2EE?). It is way behind tech companies and the pay is okay. There is not much interesting problems to solve, since you can't do much unless you are senior management. There are so many mediocre developers, or Stack Overflow developers who only know how to copy/paste source code from Stack Overflow. Code quality is pretty bad and the standard is pretty low. If you are looking to get a job with easy pay and don't do much, this is a perfect company to work for. However, as a software engineer, this would be the worst company to work for. Just go to a tech company; you will have more fun and work with interesting problems and a good tech stack.

Pros: - Large company with lots of opportunities. - Good 401K with match, and they still have a pension. - Employee perks.

Cons: Most IT jobs have been, or are in the process of being, outsourced. There's lots of red tape to get anything done. The large bureaucracy creates lots of bottlenecks and extra work. I was logging over 60 hours a week with the included weeknights and weekend deployments.