Non-tech managers and fiefdoms - Engineer FINRA Employee Review

2.0
30 Nov 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

They downgraded their optional health plans, like most companies these days, but the time off, 401 match, and other benefits are still great. You have to land a permanent position first, however.

Cons

FINRA is still a company of contractors and poor planning. They are planning to lay off or push out half of each of most of the teams on the tech side as the aws migration finishes up. Most people on the hardware side expect it and understand it, but the irony is, finra would be better off keeping its technical talent and slicing out all of middle management and some of the vps. This is a company of too many chefs and not enough cooks—and most of the chefs are ones you’d see getting yelled at by Gordon Ramsey for sucking so bad to extend the metaphor. Finra is full of nontech managers who use their employees knowledge as their own and make technical decisions without discussing with their technical team first. I can count on my hand the managers that are technical and know what they are doing. But, even then finra is company of fiefdoms as well on the tech side. One team builds a tool that is similar to what another team is working on, instead of working together for something bigger and better, both teams waste time building a different version of the same thing!! Even better, the senior management push to get every app in the cloud by a certain date is such a hardline that developers and literally forced to send unfinished apps into prod. They run deployments and literally tell ops they don’t know how to support or run it and this is prod. Core apps are breaking and crashing and those same tech teams get laid off as managers who caused this problem in the first place sit back. Finra is on the cusp of really dying right now. Major contracts have been lost as well—because management is not letting technical folks work together to build a better product.

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FINRA Response
6y
Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback. We strive to maintain an open, respectful and collaborative culture within all teams and their management. You’ve mentioned a number of items that we are really concerned about and we want to hear more from you. We strongly encourage you to reach out to your HR coordinator for a conversation about your experience and how we can address some of the issues you’ve mentioned here.

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Cons

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