Wells Fargo

1. WFH, shift allowance.
2. You get an iPhone and laptop for continuous availability at work.
3. Good security cycles during release and a well-established working environment.
4. The ease of logging in from anywhere with the work laptop, as the VDIs are maintained in a remote environment.

Though the company is established and has better ethics and working style, the managers play a crucial role in driving the projects and deliverables. Most of the power in dealing with teams lies with managers, so they are the strength of the company.

They have a role like technology managers, but I could hardly see any technical knowledge or any inclination towards a technology-driven roadmap. All I can see is lots of people management and poor project understanding from the managers, which leads to very pathetic decision-making in deliverables.

Most of the time in a day was spent with managers, making them understand the issues and any release failure blockers so that they can speak in technical terms with leadership. This cost a lot of time and gave contract employees the opportunity to stay on the floor without any proper output.

As a lead, there is a lot of pressure to support the non-technical managers and team members (mostly contractors without laptops).

Since in Wells, most of the work starts in the evenings (Indian time around 6 PM, God knows when the calls end in Agile), heavy load on FT leads to working in the morning office and covering the evening calls and any business interactions.

This is just a glimpse of the working environment.

Adding to this platform, support, and dev teams reporting to a non-technical manager, attrition started in the team. Then the contractors' number started increasing in the team. FT's number dwindled. Even though we escalated on few non-performing contractors, there was no action taken towards them.

I request to invest in technical managers. People managers driving heavy technical projects lead to negative output. Having skip-level meetings with team members in a scheduled manner and the availability of HR to escalate such issues will pave the way to act in a timely fashion.