Morgan Stanley

Overall company culture is fine and fair, with great benefits.

Benefits include:

• Private pension (4+4%)
• Healthcare insurance (mostly pays for first visits at doctors)
• Cafeteria with good options for 4-5 meals
• Sport card, which I use to go to the spa

You can use a few online learning sites (but only from within your VDI).

Teams are forced to be Agile, if you have a good Scrum Master and PO that can work well.

Company had a mature IT infrastructure 20 years ago, with internal CLI tools for basically everything (config management, distributed filesystem, process scheduler, pub/sub system, web hosting, etc.). Today we have better third-party industry standards for these, but typically you can't use those in practice, because migration effort is "costly and risky."

Although going to the cloud and modernization is an often-cited company goal, in practice, most legacy core components are bound to the company's inner infrastructure and custom tools. Therefore, those components and hundreds of dependers cannot go to the public cloud. Partially, some are trying to use on-premise on-demand resources.

The company likes to fire a certain percentage of employees from time to time to save costs. For reasonable refactors (stabilization and modernization), there are not enough resources. Minimal teams are trying to keep the system's head above water by desperately handling constant support issues, mandatory upgrades, critical bug fixes, and urgent, short-term business needs.

Internal mobility is possible, but most projects are similar. Advancing in a career is an unclear process with lots of fluid requirements. No one can explain what you have to do exactly for being promoted (or just nominated, at least). It's easier to leave the company and return later to a higher position than to be promoted during years of committed work.

Decide if you want to minimize employee costs now, OR have a winning IT culture which can keep up with accelerating market needs in the future. You cannot do both (and now I can only see the first).