Morgan Stanley

These comments are specific to my time in Technology & Data in London.

I found a welcoming collegiality during my time at Morgan. Co-workers were realistic about the good and bad of the systems they were in charge of and always seemed open to discussions about new approaches to improving them (and often acted on those discussions).

This collegial aspect was reflected through the organization, with management setting the tone for those below them to follow. I generally found most people easy to work with.

There are lots of smart people in Morgan IT, both from a business as well as a technology perspective.

Morgan has evolved a substantial capability for remote work, and many managers are comfortable with people working from home on a regular basis (and they do it themselves).

For the parts of the organization I'm familiar with, I would say that Morgan has less stress on perpetually working long hours than other places have. In general, I found work-life balance good, hampered the most through their inconvenient location in Canary Wharf, which often entails miserable commutes.

Promotions are available but aren't handed out willy-nilly.

ED-level promotions are taken quite seriously and a lot of review by a lot of people takes place. This results in getting pretty good people in senior roles.

One thing I really appreciated was the fact that Morgan has such a good culture but doesn't go around broadcasting it as a selling point. I've come to learn that the organizations that talk the most about how good their culture is often have lots of unattractive aspects to hide, but Morgan doesn't talk about its own culture much at all—they simply walk the walk. I'm starting to be convinced that this is a hallmark of a truly good culture.

Although some complain about it, I found Morgan's internal automation of IT to be pretty impressive. Most of the time, software can be delivered with minimal fuss.

Morgan is resource constrained, and IT finds much of its budget devoted to things it has to do rather than things that it feels are new and important to do, either for itself or for the business.

Thus, new and interesting work, although available, isn't always easy to get involved with, so if that's important, you may want to bear that in mind.

Morgan also has some fairly old systems that it has to live with due to the point above; some are better than others, although many are surprisingly robust and handle significant volumes on a daily basis.

There's strategic work to lay the foundation for changing many of those, but that's going to take a good amount of time to achieve.

Some people complain that there's too much consensus building, and that it takes too long to reach decisions.

I've heard stories about how people thought that a decision was reached, but when someone discovered they had been left out, the entire decision was scuttled and had to be discussed all over again.

I never witnessed that specifically, and making significant decisions doesn't seem any more fraught than in any other big bank, but I have had that communicated to me by multiple people there.

While the rigorous promotion process yields quality results, Morgan is frugal with promotions, and there's a fair amount of competition, so if moving up rapidly in IT is important, you should bear this in mind.

As with other banks, Morgan pays above average for IT as a whole, but bonuses have suffered in recent years.

Some MDs have told me their view is that since the days of big profits are probably not coming back, Morgan may be constrained structurally in how good bonuses will get.

Morgan's location strategy is to focus on building IT capacity in non-major metro areas, which includes Glasgow, Montreal, Budapest, and Shanghai.

Often this leads management to conclude that London is ideally situated as it has significant time overlaps with all of these locations.

If you're happy to spend the majority of your day on the phone in meetings with remote workers as they overlap with the UK business day, then this will be heaven for you, but if you want to actually get work done, the amount of communication you need to perform will be challenging to say the least.

Morgan uses a quintilling process (forced ranking) as part of the review cycle, and there's just too much evidence that this is actually a poisonous practice for organizations.

Morgan seems to have so far managed to avoid its ill effects, but be aware that a ranking distribution must be met.

As with most banks, career opportunities dwindle as you move up in the org.

Don't lose your nerve regarding your strategic IT initiatives; their success will become a big part of what will help you recruit quality candidates in the future. Keep up the good work establishing the collegial tone of the place; it engenders a lot of loyalty and goodwill.

Dump the quintilling practice; there's too much evidence out there that it poisons workplaces. Make the case for improving IT bonuses; the retention of institutional memory is worth it.

Find some way to make the location strategy more effective; too much time is spent by senior people in NY and London managing people in the other locations.