Visa

CEO Al Kelley has been great at focusing on employee morale and satisfaction over the past couple of years. However, many of the policies he publishes are not followed by management. They have offered some nice new benefits, such as time off for elderly/emergency care. However, those are pretty standard.

Thanks to Dee Hock, Visa has a great business model that will continue to generate growth for years to come. I am certain that the folks outside of technology are working for a great company.

Since this is a one-star review, I will start by saying I didn't submit this lightly. I read several other reviews that indicate a similar experience in Austin and now hope that this will lead to some sort of positive change.

I see that HR responds to these by saying to call a "hotline" which I did months before I wrote this (August 2018). This should be the first red flag.

To be fair, I will also say the Technology organization is divided into two different organizations. One is DMPD (Digital Mobile Product Development) which likely doesn't have the same issues I am about to enumerate.

Let me address why I gave everything one star (except benefits):

Career Opportunities: I applied, interviewed, and tested for an internal position. I was then asked by the hiring manager to continue to the last phase of the process but was blocked by my current management. No opportunity to learn and apply new tech, and I am not alone in this assessment. This is an example of how they publish a policy about internal mobility but allow management to actively ruin your career. Nobody has your back.

Compensation: I was lured in by a pension, but a few months later it was "frozen," i.e., canceled. They are stingy with stock as well, and the ESPP is not great, as you are forced to hold shares for over a year, which means several are under water right now.

They have a 10% 401K match, but most of the Fidelity funds have lost money this year. There is no fund above a Morningstar rating of 3.

Their benefits are decent (4 weeks PTO) and better than most any smaller company, but definitely not in the top tier.

Work Life Balance: This can be one of the worst things about Visa. Working in Technology, the release process can be manual and antiquated. Many career Visa employees are resistant to modernizing such processes. Get ready to spend all weekend with little sleep doing a manual release. It's not fun, and you don't learn anything. Secondly, there is not good co-location and ownership with teams in some organizations, including mine. If you are in the US, you may find yourself being asked to attend meetings at all hours of the day and night, during lunch, etc. You can't get away for a workout, and there is little flexibility in schedule.

Senior Management: Every year, they have an annual survey, and the feedback on important items like having the tools to do your job is low and blatantly ignored (every year). Nothing meaningful is ever done. They think making a better expense reporting mechanism or ticketing system is "good enough." The laptop you rely on to do your work is so bogged down by onerous security software and constant patching, it's really tough to be efficient. If you're lucky, your laptop will be rebooted several times a week and sometimes take hours to become available again. Otherwise, you'll end up taking it to IT for a long time.

Also, the proxy server you are forced to use will block you from basic tools such as GitHub and downloading simple Eclipse plugins. Blocking some sites makes sense, but basic stuff is not attainable with any reliability.

Culture and Values: This is the worst aspect of Visa. It is the least diverse workplace I've ever been a part of. It's a top-down sort of arrangement where your manager suddenly tells you to do five different things out of the blue because his/her manager told them to make you do this. Given that most employees are fearful, they generally drop what they are doing to try and please the manager. At the end of the day, you end up with your head spinning, and there is little if any acknowledgment when you fight through the clutter and accomplish something meaningful.

English is spoken less than other languages in the cubicles. I felt like an alien in my own country working here.

Treat everyone with respect.

Throw away the PowerPoint slides and canned demos.

Make a serious evaluation of what the Technology organization has delivered in the past 4 years.