Visa

One of the main reasons to work at Visa is that it is a "safe" employer.

They never get rid of anyone. Even if you are underperforming as an individual contributor, the bonuses and compensation are not really tied to your performance because everyone basically gets an "average".

Also, there are plenty of reasons not to get something done. You can always point at another department and say, "I couldn't finish my thing because I was blocked by someone over in ...".

If you keep your head down, don't make any noise but show up for work and meetings, you will continue to draw a paycheck for as long as you want.

But if you want to innovate, don't believe anything they say about it. We've been told for over a year to change our methodology to Agile. The result? The groups who are successful at it (especially in my org under Loyalty) were buried UNDER another team that is waterfall and will remain so, while folks that were taking pot-shots at us got moved up.

The majority of our work is done by BPO outsourcing, but none of our vendors are effective. We have roughly a 1:4 ratio of FTE to BPO in my org. It takes one FTE to lead a team of 4 BPO, and the BPO doesn't get the work done. So we are paying 5 people to do the work of 1 FTE. Why do we keep doing it? Because the executives with the biggest budgets get the biggest bonuses.

Adopting new technologies is a sure path to corporate death. It is a company full of seagull architects who "swoop down, poop on everything and fly away". The company has armies of architects who aren't responsible for delivering value, but if they approve something, they feel they own it. So they say "no" in an effort to keep the amount of work they have to do at a minimum.

This is plainly clear in their last employee survey, which pointed out that their #1 challenge to their employees was getting work done. As soon as that was announced, the security team launched a pilot to remove admin rights from developers' laptops so that they need to ask approval to do things such as look at environment variables, check their system load, or profile their machine's performance. How insane is that?!?!?!

I have worked at Visa for 4 years and as of this week finally reached my limit. I am on my way out, and 4 top engineers I work with have already asked me to try to find a place where they can follow.

Your integrity is in question, technology managers. If you say one thing but don't stand by your decision, or if you let your staff go in a different direction, that means nobody knows what to do. When you lose people, just remember that you are either set up to lose the best or have lost the worst in your teams. The best and worst can't exist together.

So, find ways to support your top people rather than entertain the masses of ne'er-do-wells. Identify your top talent, find what they need to be successful, and then act on that.

Remember the Steve Jobs quote: Don't hire smart people so that you can tell them what to do. Hire smart people so that they can tell you what to do.