Visa

My team is a little more flexible than others. Everyone is very nice. OK, first job out of college.

I almost didn't work here -- not because I didn't want to, but because they "lost my file" in transitioning from intern to full time (to which they said the HR person no longer works here).

But stuff like that seems to happen more often than you'd expect at such a big company (almost everyone on my team had a similar experience).

They also just cut benefits -- a lot. They used to have a pension pay-in plan -- now they won't contribute anything (basically a 6% pay cut). Our health insurance went up 15%. It was explained to us that this is because they want to "be aligned/median" with the benefits of other "tech" companies, but we keep on being told that they're trying to make Visa "the employer of choice." It's hard to be median with other tech companies when they provide wellness centers, free food, and other on-site services, and we don't even get those -- just our benefits slashed.

And worst of all, during performance reviews, they basically told college hires, "Well, all college hires are looked at basically the same," and gave us a 0% pay increase and not even a full bonus, even if we are high performers by their own metrics. (We are being pushed to track everything and measure our efficiency in arbitrary ways, like lines of code).

This isn't what I hoped it would be as a first job out of college. There is some opportunity to learn, but not a lot to grow. There's a lot of "well, that's just how it is," in addition to cutting benefits. They will tell you almost anything to get you to sign the contract as well.

Former Visa interns, beware!

Listen to your employees. Think about the impact of how you deliver messages. Don't lump all college hires into a box. Stop trying to "standardize" performance reviews across the board and measure efficiency and value by "lines of code" and other arbitrary metrics.