Good first job but terrible for career growth
Pros
Really good schemes for graduates and retraining non-computer science graduates, veterans and those returning to work after a career break Good perks like private healthcare Salary is good for graduates If you are lucky you will get a good team that have interesting projects and/or good managers that don't take you for granted They are building a nice new Glasgow office
Cons
Technology & Career Growth Outdated technology and mundane programming tasks. Code quality is poor. Too many ‘Yes’ men push untested code into production on a regular basis to get things out quicker to impress management. Absolutely no time or resources dedicated to training or personal growth. Any training you do get is minimal and you have to fight for it. If you are not diligent at spending time outside of work learning new technologies, you will be left behind. There is a lot of internal technology to keep people trapped in their jobs with no transferable skills. Avoid CIB and ‘Athena’ for this reason. Half the job is being on support or calls rather than coding. No concept of agile or proper programming practices. Those who have been at JP Morgan for a while are very stuck in their ways and refuse to try anything new. It is very hard to try anything new because of all the red tape. Compensation Once you roll off the graduate scheme, your pay rises become minimal. Those who just completed the grad scheme are getting paid substantially more than associates who rolled off the grad scheme two years prior. As soon as you get promoted to associate, get yourself out of there! Record breaking profits in pandemic haven’t reached workers who have hardly had pay rise in 2 years (at least in Glasgow), yet CEO gets 9.5% pay rise this year. Work Culture Promotions based on box ticking rather than meaningful contributions. People who are the backbone of their team are often overlooked and management take them for granted. Many stay at JP Morgan for their whole career and focus too much on getting promoted (not their fault, the culture is rewarding the wrong behaviour) and playing politics rather than becoming better software engineers. Forced return to the office despite majority of employees prefer working from home. They are expecting 3 days a week in the office for tech staff. I was forced to go back into the office for a day to ‘show face’ last year and there was 5 people on my floor in that day.. Toxic work culture and pressure to do longer hours and even weekend work. American colleagues answering emails at 4am and on their days off. Colleagues in India are expecting to work 12+ hours regularly and not appreciated at all. It is a depressing work environment. ‘Asked’ to work weekends with no compensation in terms of pay or time off with little notice. I had to work 12 days in a row a few times and was not given anything in return, and when I tried to ask for 2 days back I was told I could leave an hour early on the Friday.. Managers are not given enough training and it shows. I had a manager that told me that I had to stop leaving at 5pm and put in more hours if I wanted to be taken seriously, despite me having one of the highest work outputs on the team. He also made a lot of unprofessional comments about the diversity training that made me very uncomfortable.
