Morgan Stanley

The Glasgow office staff try very hard to keep the office fun.

There is a nice gym and a nice canteen.

Where to start?

Hardware is obsolete. The PC was underspecified and 4 years old when I joined. Servers were 10+ years old. Software developers need decent spec'd PCs. Time is money, and when your PC can take 30+ seconds to display Outlook due to only having 2GB of memory (2010!!) and using 4GB of swap... well....

Software quality is non-existent.

• Only manual testing performed by an overworked team who know little about the software they are testing.
• No automated testing to speak of. No unit tests.
• 1 manual test cycle per release. Any issues found are brushed over. Most code is not tested.

Monthly releases are done between 11 PM and 7 AM Friday night to Saturday morning. Release dates can change, and in 20 months working there, I had two holidays cancelled due to changing dates without recompense (lost hotels, concert tickets). When I complained, I was told, "Perhaps investment banking is not for you."

Staff are totally overstretched. Very bright people are producing terrible software due to a lack of continual personal development and absolutely no peer review system.

Many of the engineers don't understand source control. Code is regularly copied around.

Most engineers don't understand md5sums, diff, patch, etc.

No code reviews whatsoever. Literally anything could be put into the codebase. Think Superman III and Richard Pryor's half-penny scam, etc. Simply unacceptable in a place working with so much money.

Lots of paperwork filling and box ticking - understandable if the processes for which the paperwork is done work. Pointless if they don't.

Regularly, people don't know what they are doing or the area they are working in and so lie / make things up so as not to look bad in front of management. This results in countless hours / days wasted each month with people having to double-check things as you simply can't trust what anyone outside your immediate team says.

Interview process was dreadful. Many applicants had no proper competency testing, and their applications were fast-tracked because of their previous employment history and not their actual skills.

None, see cons section.