Visa

Interesting concepts can sometimes come up.

• Work-life balance is bad.
• Finger-pointing is second nature to most people.
• Management has a lot of power, especially the people that have been there for 10-plus years. They can basically do what they want, regardless of what their managers say.
• Lot of times, they try to reinvent the wheel but add 10,000x more complexity because they want to be fully security compliant out the door. There isn't an idea of an MVP (Minimal Viable Product).
• Zero mentorship; it is a very "they will throw you in the deep end" mentality because time and effort are not valued into growing talent.
  • This really speaks to the type of people that are there: You either have a fresh new grad or you have people that have been working in industry for 10-plus years.
  • There is a very "I am busy, you need to figure it out" type of attitude.
  • Planning is not done well, and job functions have a very fuzzy line in terms of what you should be doing.
  • Compensation is at the lowest end of the spectrum.
  • The ESPP plan is complete garbage and just a cheap way to give employees some stock incentives, as they canceled their pension plan a long time ago.
• Anything you ask HR about outreach or something they can't link you to and read a reference is a black hole, and you will never hear about it again.

Really invest in mentorship. There are so many new and young talents that are not even attracted to Visa because of how "humble" they are with the things they do.

If you want to be a tech company, you need to participate in tech-related activities (hack days, hackathon sponsorship, etc.) and advertise via tech blogs. If you don't want to do this, don't call yourself a tech company.

Stop finger-pointing; allow some breathing room and properly organize tasks. Tasks come from management very vaguely, and it's up to the lower half (non-management) to make a product from this. When the product isn't what management expected, the issue comes right back to the non-management folks who did the work.

There needs to be a company standard for how all teams at Visa work, and they need to really re-evaluate compensation to be more competitive with these other tech companies.

There needs to be a more nurturing environment rather than a hostile environment. Also, definitely don't tell people in meetings that they should be thankful to be getting paid, and don't always expect an annual bonus in times of COVID.