ERM eFront Professional Services: mediocre workplace atmosphere, narrow-minded management and limited career evolution
Pros
Reputation of BlackRock Mindset of BlackRock Tons of market information and analysis Higher than average salary FTO work from home policy 60% on site, 40% home office
Cons
ERM eFront team proposed the worst workplace environments during my 11 year career : the turnover has been high for the recent years, because some of the senior team members are having literally bad attitude towards everybody with new ideas and will of change because they surely feel insecure for their well established places. In addition I have been a witness of anti-DEI discussions which is completely not coherent with BlackRock's culture. The Project Managers are doing lots of setup and testing and should are required to ask for permission for every little action or change. The work-life balance is mediocre, because too much time is spent on non-value added tasks like reporting and useless meeting where collaborators with no direct impact are invited to participate and last, but not least the change is not welcome and promoted by the management. The management is frequently sending emails during the weekends and on vacations and therefore some of the colleagues are following with the same habits. The ERM team has very limited connection with the rest of the BlackRock teams and struggles to integrate in the ecosystem. Timesheets are not used at all and time allocation is adjusted by the management which is hiding all the valuable information to determine which clients are profitable and who ones are not. When I explained that we should change this process with the correct arguments, it was suggested that I can record my timesheet on my own if I like it... Non-regression testing is done manually by using print screens of the screen versions and Project Managers are doing the task, because there is not enough workforce in the QA team. There is a significant mismatch between the job tasks in a daily basis and job description promised during the interview: lots of solution setup tasks and manual testing for a VP position VS strategy and big changes on the horizon promised during the interview. As a FinTech solution, there is not clear strategy of how to develop the business in the future and in addition the current solution is too specific for multiple clients, which means there is serious difficulty to propose proper SaaS solution and that makes the Project Manager's job even more complicated and full of non value added tasks. Not part of Aladdin and won't be in near future. It's difficult to do an internal career transfer, because ERM's business is very different from other BlackRock's business, especially in France.
