JPMorgan Chase

There is a ton of opportunity to build skills into your resume from working here.

There is a company-wide push towards AWS and React, which I have had issues acquiring skills for in my spare time to appeal to other career opportunities.

JPMC, being as big as they are, also supplies a wealth of knowledge that I have not found in other workplaces. Granted, it is quite unorganized, so you have to really search for it sometimes.

But any kind of language, framework, or tooling you can imagine, you're likely to find some space to facilitate learning or demonstrate its use.

Work From Home (Hybrid, 3 days in office/week): Jamie Dimon absolutely HATES the idea of WFH, and it trickles down to every level of management. My team is split between people in DE, OH, NJ, NY, and even India, but we all HAVE to be in office for those Zoom calls.

Office: The firm seems to be really focused on getting everyone back into the office while holding onto cost savings from COVID restrictions. Everyone has to "hot-desk," so there's no assigned seating. Full-blown open office spaces galore; I've worked in call centers that didn't feel so loud/cramped. But don't worry, the upper management still gets their cozy little offices.

Work Culture: JPMC is the first FinTech company I have worked for, but holy mother of Tech Debt. There is such a spiderweb of dependencies between teams and no safeguard against backwards-incompatible changes, so the majority of the work ends up being migrations because "team ABC has decommissioned their API, now we have to use this." There is the typical corporate culture combining oversimplified requirements and then being inflexible with deadlines. That much I sort of accept at this point.

However, what JPMC seems to be particularly good at is allowing projects to barely reach a functioning state and marking it as "done." The team gets moved onto another project with the same expected capacity getting done each week but pretends there isn't another 1-3 months of support needed for the app that was just finished.

What's worse is that 1-3 months of support is really a pile of "requirements" that were never brought up to begin with.

Fight for your devs. So many people within JPMC seem to function purely on fear.

Fear of deadlines not getting met, fear of what will happen if a deadline is moved, fear of what happens if something isn't delivered the way it was promised.

The whole hierarchy of management continuously presses harder and harder as each person fears they might "look bad." No one wants to say "no" or tell someone their workload is too heavy under any circumstances.

Ultimately, the buck stops with the devs because we can't pass it on to anyone else. So when someone does the work to prevent devs needing to deal with all the pushback, it is an immense weight off of our shoulders and a way for us to focus more energy into actually doing dev work.