JPMorgan Chase

Compensation was good. I had four weeks of vacation, then a few personal days, and a week of sick time on top of that, starting right away from day one. Base pay was average for the local banks, but a bit above average for the area. I did not stay long enough to receive a bonus.

Terrible technology stack, terrible leadership, and a tragically awful work-life balance. You will carry a pager, work weekends, late nights, and early mornings. My team was also Agile, but in name only. The focus was project-based timelines rather than product-based change management.

I was on a team of 12 (way too large for Scrum or Agile), and we had 3 teams. One of the Scrum teams was closer to 20. Yet with nearly 50 employees, we only had 8 full-timers. As a full-time employee, when a project slips because it can't adapt to change, all the pressure will fall on the handful of full-time employees, and you will be ground down with long hours and weekend shifts supporting a project built by contractors.

JP Morgan is a fine place to work if you can get into a small, non-critical project. But if you get pulled into any new development, you will be stretched way beyond industry norms, working with the cheapest contracting labor. While the pay was good, my wife got pregnant, and with such an awful work-life balance, I had to leave. If you have young kids that you want to spend time with, do NOT come here.

Culturally, senior leadership felt very strongly that it was best to be second and to follow the industry leaders because it was much cheaper than taking risks and inventing something novel outright. Senior leadership had several town halls/meetings expounding upon this ideal. The problem with this approach was, after somebody succeeded with a specific project, JP Morgan would have to run twice as fast as the original inventor in order to launch fast enough to garner any significant market share. As such, any new development projects were already way behind schedule and had overtly unrealistic expectations, causing pretty widespread burnout among full-time employees.

As a final aside, this shop is 95% Indian males within the Wilmington development groups. JP Morgan has a much, MUCH higher proportion of Indians than the surrounding employers. It was not a problem, but the complete lack of diversity was a bit surprising for a Fortune 500 company.

Fix the work-life balance. Turnover was so high because you treated your developers so poorly. The great ones all left, and you were left with the ones who couldn't find something better.

You have to break the cycle, or you will never be an employer of choice, just an employer of last resort.