Morgan Stanley

It is hard to recommend working for this company, however.

• Excellent education and learning plans.
• Easy to work from home (even with short notice).
• Pay is good.

Good place to stay for a short while just to learn how NOT to do programming/software development. If you want to coast, then this is the place. If you just keep your head down and shut up in meetings, you can linger there forever.

Indoctrination: They hire grads and interns with little or no experience and drill into them that this is a great place to be. After which it is impossible to carry a healthy, self-critical conversation with them. The propaganda posters are the worst, with their graphs of unlabelled axes touting how great the company is.

Institutionalized workforce: They want to mould you to be a "Morgan Stanley" employee, with as few transferable skills as possible. They build everything in-house to keep people from acquiring real skills (they even went far enough to attempt to build their own programming language). A lot of the younger crowd don't realize this until it is too late. Dull eyes.

Lack of talent: The bar is set so incredibly low that you almost have to dig for it. The technical skill of the average programmer is mediocre at best, but their boasting is through the roof. Most suffer from a serious case of the Dunning–Kruger effect. Don't even start me on the strats; that sorry bunch of hacks.

Overall lack of motivation: Nobody cares about anything. All talk and no action. People have meetings about having meetings about other meetings, and then they go home. Nothing gets done. And if, by accident, something is done, it is done in the absolutely worst, lacklustre way possible.

Political nightmare: Nobody seems to be doing any work as they're all busy pointing fingers, blaming everyone else (sorry, I meant "escalating"). People actively inject themselves into conversations that have nothing to do with them. Everybody is scrambling for their own little intern/grad/"indian" to "manage". Going to team/dept drinks is nothing short of a sickening brown-nosing session, which most managers lap up (as most deliberately surround themselves with yes-people).

Severely backwards when it comes to technology and software: They're still running on Windows XP in 2012. Nothing gets upgraded until it is already outdated, which is a favourite complaint on the in-house mailing list.

Actively hostile environment to software developers: Development environments crash constantly (i.e., Visual Studio and Eclipse) due to over-the-top restrictive access controls and antiquated OSs. C++ devs have it the best, but only because they use Textpad or something even more primitive.

Computers are slow, software is slow, people are slow—everything is slow!

Fire your fat middle management layer. Get a grip on your workforce; you're hemorrhaging money in all the wrong places.