Wells Fargo

Benefits are great, pay is great (at least in IT), lots and lots of new openings, job security, remote/hybrid work (in IT), possible room for increasing your skills.

IT is going through a transformation. Groups were divided up into dev, platform, and other specialized teams (DBAs, network, etc.).

At the start, this wasn't too bad, but now it appears platform teams are being thrown anything and everything that other teams don't like doing or want to do. This is leading to an insane amount of work for platform, who have limited human capital to handle all of these tasks efficiently.

For example, there's a group who handles switching datacenters in the event of an emergency, but they didn't want to do it anymore. Suddenly, platform handles it now, with little to no training beforehand.

Work/life balance has all but vanished, making working on a platform team a miserable experience for anyone.

Additionally, some of the management are relatively new (1 year or less) and micromanage their employees.

It appears there's discrimination in the form of some managers going the extra mile in making life easier for offshore counterparts while forcing their onshore reports to handle offshore responsibilities, which offshore has handled for years prior to the transformation.

For example, Wells uses offshore colleagues for business continuity, thus they begin work during the onshore evenings, working until the onshore afternoon the next day. During their hours, they handle all work until the onshore colleagues return in the morning.

However, management is forcing/requiring onshore to log on in the evenings during offshore hours to handle deployments that are offshore responsibility. This is also contributing to a loss of work/life balance.

The company passes business continuity and their related exercises to teammates on platform teams, titling those handling the responsibilities as BRCs and BRMS (overseeing the BRCs' completion of the exercises).

Platform team leadership is wanting to pass these responsibilities to just a select few BRCs, responsible for possibly 10, 20, or 30+ applications, which involves a lot of intricate, time-consuming tasks.

This wouldn't be as bad if this is all the BRCs had to do, but a majority are a part of platform teams who handle the onshore support responsibly as well. Again, this contributes to a loss of work/life balance.

Training is lacking; it barely exists. Most of the people on these dev/platform teams were moved to their current teams and have little knowledge of the applications they now support. Additional applications keep getting moved to different teams with no knowledge and very limited training beforehand.

• Before having platform teams take on additional responsibility, adequately train the teams in these new duties and bring on additional resources to account for the increased workload.

• Stop forcing on-shore to handle off-shore responsibilities (and vice-versa, though it primarily appears to be happening more on the latter). This completely eliminates the whole point of having 24/7/365 availability and support, and puts a completely unnecessary strain on both off-shore and on-shore teams.

• BRC exercises are an insane amount of work when you have to work with very large applications. Take that into consideration prior to assigning just a couple of BRCs a massive amount of applications to be responsible for.

• Many on platform teams are miserable but are too afraid to mention it. Some bring up that they are unable to meet these unreasonable demands and need help, yet get yelled at (literally) questioning why they don't want to do their work when all they're doing is bringing up issues that could affect the performance of the team as a whole.

• There is a lot of attrition occurring (and many on platform/dev teams looking to get out), both on-shore and off-shore, due to the reasons mentioned above. It's going to keep happening if these issues are not addressed.

• New managers are coming in all the time and immediately expecting their direct reports to know how to do every single thing on the team. Unfortunately, this isn't the case, as most of the teams were siloed to specific tasks prior to the transformation. A couple of brief training videos with audio issues throughout are insufficient for adequate training. Step up the training considerably so people on these teams don't feel like they don't belong.

• Get the work/life balance back in order for IT because it's causing an insane amount of attrition and dissatisfaction. People are going to leave en masse, and all of the reasons mentioned in this 'advice' are why (and in the cons section).