"The culture at my bank is so bad that everyone will get out when the market recovers"
I'm a senior leader in the technology team of a major US bank in America. We have a huge problem with our culture. It's something that has become very noticeable in the past few years.
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The bank seems unaware of its problem. No one is telling senior executives the truth about how bad things are here because no one wants to get fired or leave in this market. But the moment things improve, a lot of people will get out. 90% of the people I speak to tell me they're only here because the hiring market is still not great.
The problem is both politics and a new approach to engineering. We have a new group of executives who have zero focus on diversity and who have begun managing and hiring on the basis of nepotism and favoritism. They've joined from a rival bank and are now hiring their former colleagues. We used to be a meritocracy, but this is no longer the case.
At the same time, we've introduced a new approach to product development. This is supposed to increase productivity, but it's done the opposite. We're releasing less code and the quality of the work we do has fallen. Part of the problem is all the new people we've hired from outside: many of them seem incompetent but have joined in senior levels. They're forcing a lot more work onto mid-ranking staff and juniors.
Compounding all this is the fact that we're in the office full-time. I'm not in favor of homework myself but a lot of people were happy at home. Now we've started tracking people's attendance based on card swipes. I see a lot of them just swiping their cards and then going home again. It's pretty dire from a culture standpoint. And no, AI won't save the day: it's just a buzzword and the reality is that I see absolutely no impactful use cases in our pipeline.
Amar Adwani is a pseudonym
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