Pros
The company is financially stable.
Cons
Their have been major changes in the IT departments during the last 5 years under the 'VISION 13' program. There has been a rush to agile and the creation of Change the Bank teams for development work and Run the Bank teams for day to day support work. The company is trying to transition from waterfall to agile for all application no matter what the attributes of the application are. Not all applications work well with agile. The back end mainframe applications that execute ALL of the business logic for the bank and contain the applications that are the system of record were not meant for agile. These application are under a ton of government regulation (after all every bank has to pay FDIC deposit insurance) and quick on the fly decisions by an agile crew does not work. One of the big problems is how to incorporate legal into the agile crews. In addition, the company had to hire a ton of Agile Scrum master and agile coaches. It seems that none of these people know banking. Also it is almost impossible to work on a change that does not impact other applications or other projects. What makes matters worse the QA testing is the worst I have ever seen in my entire IT career. The QA testing teams are made up of a strange mix of contractors, off shore contractors and maybe a few FTE employees. They seem to have very little knowledge about the applications they test and it seems like the developers have to write the test scripts for them and execute most of the testing and then all the testers do is file the information in the repository that stores QA test results. The technology executives seem to know nothing about banking and seem to exist in their own elitist culture and they do not value the employees at all. At the moment, the applications are very unstable. The change management process seems to change almost weekly. Most of the developers are not happy and the application managers are not happy. The atmosphere at work is very negative and almost toxic. Management wants no production problems but they keep making decisions that creates more production problems. One of the biggest problems is the lack of application SMEs. The scrum masters want to assign work to anyone on their crew but many times nobody on the crew has worked in the application they want to change. Changes move to production and production issues are created. There are not enough SMEs on both the Change Bank Side and the Run the bank side to mentor the non lead developers. It will be interesting to see if the current state of affairs can be corrected. As far as benefits are concerned, the health insurance plans offered are very high deductible health insurance plans. These are not very employee friendly.