Visa

Endless supply of cash and little accountability for deliverables, perfect for someone approaching retirement.

Well-known brand, good for one's CV.

Reasonable benefits in comparison to other industries (albeit pretty average when it comes to financial services in their own right) if you're prepared to let your career stagnate.

Mostly stress-free 9-to-5 job with plenty of opportunities to decline doing anything one doesn't feel like doing on the grounds of needing someone else's approval (and one can bet there is always going to be someone to say "no").

Obsolete IT infrastructure is causing real problems when exchanging documents with the world outside Visa. The process for getting new or more up-to-date software adopted is bureaucratic and painfully slow, with outsourced corporate IT and their Visa counterparts often just passing the buck when things go wrong.

Recruitment and promotion decisions are biased and non-transparent. In the annual employee satisfaction survey, year after year, the transparency of progression persistently remains one of the 3 or 4 lowest-scoring items. Incidentally, no attempt has ever been made to address this perception.

Very "top heavy" with some managers managing only one or two employees.

Poor processes for leadership selection resulted in a system where drinking with the right people matters more than any other skills one may have. Thanks to an inadequate career progression framework, some people with neither any discernible people skills nor knowledge of their particular area got promoted to managerial roles. In process, they ended up demotivating their teams, safe in the knowledge their chums will protect them when things go wrong.

Poor decision-making - many mid-ranking managers are seemingly disempowered and unable to do anything without referring to the ones higher up the chain.

Despite the organization being heavily dependent on IT, technical proficiency is treated with disdain. If an individual gets branded as "technical" (as in, "oh, he/she is so technical"), this in Visa parlance means their progression up the career ladder is pretty much a lost cause. "Technical" as a pejorative term is a really strange attitude.

They pay lip service to Agile development and in reality end up overburdening everyone with ever-growing bureaucracy. Their default solution to any problem a project may encounter is just to throw more money and even more project managers at it, thus increasing confusion and lack of accountability until it eventually grinds to a halt.

Recent rounds of redundancies have been managed very ineptly. A number of talented individuals have been treated so badly in process that they decided to leave the organization on their own, even though Visa had intended to keep them. On the other hand, some, due to their lack of transferable skills and ultimately unemployable individuals, clung on to their existing or rebranded roles, ultimately leaving the organization depleted of critical skills just as it needs them most.

Overall lack of direction and sense of purpose - the only thing the organization is focused on right now seems to be cutting headcount (presumably to make them a more attractive proposition for sell-off). Their only "strategic" direction right now comprises trying to play catch-up with nimbler and more agile competitors. Is anyone really going to use yet another online wallet or another service for sending money to someone else just by knowing their e-mail address?

Get rid of brown-nosers who only cost ££ and deliver little.

Cut bureaucracy.

Learn to appreciate feedback from the ones reporting to you.

Above all, remember the job market is good and if your employees are unhappy, there are plenty of opportunities out there.