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Bad culture. Too much work and politics.

Applications Developer Associate
Former Employee
Worked at JPMorgan Chase for less than 1 year
June 4, 2016
New York, New York
2.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
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You also work with an outdated tech stack (Who still uses ES5, JDK5, or J2EE?).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.

Advice to Management

Get rid of bureaucracy and work politics, and hire more talented engineers.

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