JPMorgan Chase

Great pay and benefits for IT work. I appreciate the family programs and health rewards system.

Work with some of the best and smartest people. (Some not so much, but alas, it's a big company; find the good ones and work with them.)

Hard work and long hours are unrewarded; they are expected.

Often told, "Your standard workload done exceptionally is a 'meets,' middle-of-the-road performance." Our team was small and had enough work for quadruple its size (which management is FINALLY putting into effect by offshoring).

So, to accomplish the standard would require over 60+ hours a week for every individual. There was no end in sight.

I took on a huge project and worked 80-hour weeks for over three months. Direct management barely responded with an email saying "good job."

There is no teamwork; they just pass the hard work and take credit for the "concept."

Managers and HR are a team (as they should be). No one looks out for the individual contributor; you are alone.

There is no oversight or insight into a manager in the wrong role (my manager didn't know at a 10,000-foot level what swap or HTTP vs. HTTPS meant, and we are a security-first, DevOps team). They performed questionable (although not illegal) activities, especially with vendors.

Performance reviews are one-way: down. There is no way to effectively make a change, even if a written statement is proven inaccurate with other written documentation.

Email is the foundation of any written communication and is only saved for six months.

Performance reviews are six months (a joke; the only thing that matters is your rating, just a virtual signature effort) and 12 months. Therefore, everything is based on your written notes, any saved offline communications, or what your management said happened. Even if you have proven inaccuracies, there is no way to effect a change.

If you and your manager do not see eye to eye on items like work-life balance, the availability of an agreed-on solution is near zero. Contact HR? Yeah right, they'll contact your manager the first thing they get off the phone with you. Contact skip-level manager? Yeah right, put a "troublemaker" sign on your cubicle nameplate.

Although I have seen a few occasions of mobility, the bottom line is your manager sets your performance ratings. Your potential new manager will see the ratings (and will have to decide to care what they are). Your potential new manager can and will contact your current manager for feedback, and your old manager holds your release date – every time I've seen this argued at the executive director level (or above) with both HR sides involved.

Insight360 may hold the key with performance reviews (review manager to contributor and contributor to manager; and peer review). However, who is going to tell their boss they suck? (Please read above on HR and management as a team). Annual bonus raises need to shift to a real-time model to make Insight360 really work.