Company: J-P-Morgan
Date: 2021-02-10
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Smile and pretend you're not a used car salesman
Pros: Decent pay, great benefits, and a fairly easy job, overall. In other words, you can give 75% effort and coast fairly comfortably. Or, by working hard, you can see tremendous success and advance quite quickly. It's quite simple to gravitate toward the parts of the job you enjoy, or at least don't mind. If you hate cold-calling, you can easily focus on walk-in customers. If you hate dealing with people face-to-face, you can spend all day on the phone trying to schedule appointments and a half-decent manager will praise you for it. For a professional office environment, most of my former coworkers were remarkably relaxed and friendly. Work-life balance is fairly solid. Aside from days when I was asked to come in after a coworker called in sick, I never felt like I was on-the-clock after the branch closed.
Cons: Many years, raises were promised or hinted at and rarely materialized. For all the talk about customer service and taking care of clients, it's absolutely a pure sales job. Many bankers would gladly urge clients into financial products that weren't right for them because of a perverse commission incentive and pressure from upper management. You either adapt and start feigning enthusiasm for it around customers, or suffer the equivalent of a pay cut. There's always some new program or company initiative that gets pushed super hard for about 6 months, then vanishes without a word. Branches are perpetually understaffed. Not *terribly* but just enough that you're screwing coworkers out of their lunch break if you have to call in sick. 

The biggest con? A lack of accountability. If a banker is a top performer, sales-wise, they can basically get away with murder. I've known several who harassed customers, threw things at coworkers, or repeatedly violated internal controls. But, because they happened to land one or two multi-million dollar clients, management looked the other way for years.

I'm not saying it's like that everywhere or all the time. It's not. But... don't be surprised when you do see it happen.