Company: J-P-Morgan
Date: 2016-07-21
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Never forget it's a bank, not a technology company
Pros: The benefits package is good, lots of options for extra health, dental, ... coverage.

The offices in Glasgow are located right bang in the centre of the city - a great location. 

Vast majority of people are doing their best in difficult circumstances.

The volume of work is pretty low - see cons section for some comments on this but it does mean time pressure is not really a problem.

If you are a 20-something looking for a graduate job then it's likely a great career move.
Cons: I should say at outset that I had previously only wokred in science and technology, for around 20 years..

Starting as a VP at JPM I was simply amazed at the state of their technology. This is how technology used to be the in 1980s, they simply haven't moved forward.  so it's close to 20 years behind the technology curve, a ton of manual work.

The vast majority of the "technologists" have no significant background in real technology - mostly working (hard) up the greasy pole.  "Building their network" is most people's priority, meant in the making personal connections sense.

If you know what words like "socket", "latency":, or "character encoding" mean you will be massively in the minority. There are a zillion IT groups, each split into L1, L2, and L3, and   each responsinle for a minute sub-section of the overall IT landscape. My team was 25+ people. In previous environments that should have been a team of 4-6, but such a team would not wokr a JPM - the systems are simply not stable enough.

The whole place seems to work without any solution architects, so many "solutions" are not fit for purpose. A project owner typically leave a project once it reaches "operations", shortly after a farce of a process called "Permission to Operate" and a half-hearted KT session, and therefore there is no effective accountability.

Change Management is even worse.  Typially 50-100 people need to approve each change, so whoever initiated it is responsible for chasing people to click a button on a ITSM-tool, which of course most eventually do without even reading a word. Since there is no accountability it does not really matter, so its just a chore that slows an already slow system down even further.

I was there 5 months - in that period the onboarding process had not yet been completed. which sort of says it all. Everyone there for a long period of time is sort of used to it being as it is, and just accepts it. Tech savvy people dont hang around long - it's simply too frustrating.