Good company, IT Management is horrible & completely out of touch! - IT Professional M&T Bank Employee Review

-Healthcare insurance is very expensive, no pet insurance offered. -Information Technology is severely understaffed and has a high turnover rate, which is not surprising. The expectations set by the various levels of IT management are completely out of touch with the staffing levels - much like a child in a toy store who wants everything they see, but has a budget set by their parents, only the child doesn't want to hear anything about a budget, they just want want want and expect employees to work overtime to pay for their new ideas/toys. -I was flat out lied to by my supervisor when offered a Full Time position, by agreeing to allow me to work from home 3 days a week in lieu of accepting a lower salary. I was not able to begin working from home until 1 month after my start date and instead of being allowed to WFH 3 days a week as agreed to, it was reduced to 1 day a week - my request to renegotiate my salary was rejected. This underhanded tactic unfairly took away my ability to negotiate for a market rate salary with 1 day a week WFH. The lying & underhanded tactics I was personally subjected to completely destroyed my trust in IT management. (FWIW, I would have been completely okay with 1 day a week WFH, minus the lying and a more competitive salary) My supervisor failed me and failed to build a trusting relationship. -Unrealistic expectations by IT management and supervisors that do not have the necessary background/experience to be effective leaders. -When I needed to take off 2 hours for a doctors appointment on a Monday, and worked an additional 12 hours overtime that same week, my supervisor would not allow me to deduct the 2 hours from the overtime hours worked - I was forced to deduct the 2 hours from my annual PTO. When I expressed discontent with this, my supervisor stated that I was expected to work overtime and any time out of the office will incur PTO deduction. My supervisor expected me to work overtime without being accommodating/compromising of the need to take off time for doctor's appointments. -My supervisor was very much against written communications and only wanted to communicate over the phone or face-to-face, which goes towards his observed underhanded tactics of hiding the proof that he lies & manipulates the people that report to him. Without written communications, you have zero proof of his misdeeds. Any supervisor worth his salt would not be afraid of written communications, and would stand by his word - not try to cover his tracks by conveniently "forgetting" what was discussed just a few weeks ago, let alone a few days ago. If memory fails this person within a matter of days/weeks, then surely a good supervisor would embrace written communications, not run from it. My supervisor actively tried to cover their tracks by changing details of past verbal discussions or conveniently forgot what he agreed to, in order to make themselves look better. -Constant meetings (5-6 hours a day), which makes focusing on getting work done & meeting project deadlines quite difficult. Without being directed to do so, you're expected to be available and work evenings & weekends in order to get the work done, assist other teams & meet project deadlines, that you would otherwise get done during normal business hours without constantly being in meetings, often times irrelevant meetings. -Meetings are unnecessarily redundant, where I've been in 3 "team meetings" a day and also required to participate in meetings that do not involve my expertise or team - the same information conveyed in that 2 hour meeting, could easily be shared in an email as an FYI. When I brought this up to my supervisor, specifically with respect to our team's time being unnecessarily/inappropriately utilized and when we could be spending time on issues/projects that do require our attention, they blew it off like I was wasting their time. My supervisor failed the team in not calling out other managers/teams for the misuse of our time, and expected us to work overtime in the evenings/weekends in order to make up for their failures. -Operations staff do not properly triage support issues before engaging Engineering staff, which results in the proverbial "tossing grenades over the fence" work mentality. All too often, my team would receive "escalated" incidents from Operations staff that did very little, if any, troubleshooting work on the issue they were initially assigned - this resulted in Engineering staff functioning as day-to-day Operations staff, while still being held accountable to the issues/project deadlines on the Engineering side of the fence. This is a training/accountability issue, I get it - it happens. But when I brought this issue up to my supervisor, they directed me to talk directly with the supervisor of the Operations Staff and was not interested in resolving the issue at hand. My supervisor failed to lead our team and meet/speak with other supervisors in curbing bad habits of other teams not doing their jobs properly before engaging our team. -I personally witnessed two of my teammates get negative performance reviews due to IT management's unrealistic expectations and my teammates being punished for it. IT management was unyielding when realistic expectations were conveyed, based on industry standard. To be completely transparent, I was never given a negative performance review and was highly praised for my expertise & work ethic, but I personally witnessed & was told by team members of the negative performance reviews they received due to completely unrealistic expectations set upon them. In other words, my team members were being punished via their performance reviews for not working evenings/weekends to make the impossible happen. -24/7/365 availability is expected (implicitly) - Operations staff are 'explicitly' required to be available 24/7/365, Engineering staff are 'implicitly' expected to be available 24/7/365, in particular when working on projects that affect production systems (i.e. new solutions being deployed/supported) - this is regardless of whether you are on PTO. I've witnessed that it's normal for people who go on PTO to overtly state that they will not have access to email/phone/text - which of course is not truthful, but is commonly stated as a way to CYA so you can ignore calls from work when on PTO. This is completely unnecessary and it's a shame that employees have to resort to this behavior, but IT Management has unrealistic expectations of understaffed teams and has created this toxic environment. -M&T is adopting the "Agile" work method, as opposed to the "Waterfall" method - for the DevOps folks, this may be a good thing, but not all of M&T is DevOps. For the Operations/Engineering departments, this is several steps in the wrong direction. The Agile methodology was created for software development, not for daily Operations & Engineering teams, which ultimately requires sufficient staffing levels - Agile requires faster clock cycles than Waterfall, and with understaffed Departments/Teams, M&T Bank is expecting their current understaffed teams to work faster & longer hours to accomplish the same goals. The claim is that Agile is a more efficient work style, when the opposite is true in a Operations/Engineering environment. In simplistic terms, Waterfall = ready, aim, fire. Agile = ready, fire, aim. There is a big difference between the two; this information is plastered all over the internet and there's an overwhelming amount of tested scenarios/industry experts who clearly state that the Agile work method does not work in production environments, please look this up for yourself before drinking the M&T koolaid. Beware of this, if your job function is not DevOps! -Massively open floor plans, literally a chest-high cube farm/city with zero privacy. This makes focusing on work/meeting deadlines quite difficult, as you're frequently visited by other people for favors, questions & personal banter - it quickly became overwhelming. Of course, the issues that are brought to your attention are "emergencies" that require immediate attention, which forces you to either stop doing your own work/miss project deadlines and get yelled at by IT Management or don't assist with the emergency at your desk and possibly get yelled at by IT Management. This is not a healthy way to operate an IT Department and this behavior goes on and on, completely unchecked. -After submitting my 2 week notice to resign from my position, I was not asked by a single person, IT management or by the HR department as to "why" I was leaving. This completely contradicts M&T Bank's message that they care for their employees and hold communications to the highest possible standard. This goes to clarifying M&T Bank's main priority, which is not the welfare of their top performers, rather top profits for their investors at the expense of their employees working around the clock on understaffed teams.