Morgan Stanley

James Gorman is an ethical and extremely competent CEO. Generally intelligent colleagues, although this is less true than it used to be. If you land in the right team or area, you'll be working on cool tech. Great benefits.

Truly working to rectify under-representation of women and PoC in senior positions. DEI initiatives are sincere and effective. Excellent work-life balance.

Poorly implemented forced-ranking and culling has made the work environment increasingly office-political, from once being fantastically collaborative. This has a negative impact, but senior technology management seems ideologically aligned with dog-eat-dog (because senior tech management has also exempted itself from it) and thus seems blind to the downside it has created.

Increasingly bogged down by an "Agile transformation" and regimentation that, in fact, is simply layer upon layer of new bureaucratic process and changed labels for everything. It's so far from what agility actually means that it's a bad joke. Promotions are less about merit and more about what team you happen to land in.

I worry about what will happen when James Gorman leaves. The next layer of management is not nearly so inspiring.

1. Put technologists back in charge of technology. It was a better place to work then.

2. Note very well the correlation between MS spend on so-called Agile consulting and the loss of technical superiority over peers.

3. Pay us better or continue to lose us.