Company: J-P-Morgan
Date: 2019-03-05
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Typical corporate job
Pros: JPMC is a massive company with so many different areas that you can't keep track of them.  Working in technology is one area can be very different than another area.  I was in an older area that the company had little interest in doing anything with more than simply keeping them running.  So my opinion won't apply to everywhere. 

Pros:
The pay is very good. Generally it can be at the upper end of tech salaries if you have the experience.  But you have to fit in with the manager.  Really, your manager is the only management you'll ever deal with.  Get a good one and life is easy, get a bad one and you'll be miserable.  Movement within the company only happens if you can get in with the manager doing the hiring.  Its all about "relationships".  The jobs are stable for the most part, though quiet, small layoffs happen every so often.  They just don't talk about it.  There are bonuses, and they can be great, but once again it depends on your manager.  Mine was fantastic and gave me great bonuses each year.  Other managers hold that above their employees head whenever there is an issue, and then they'll give out really small ones.  I got about a 10% bonus.  But I spoke to another employee who was being threatened by his manager all the time with his bonus and ended up getting maybe a 3% bonus.  I convinced him to look for another job.  

Another pro is that the company is very diverse.   That's a big initiative and generally works well.

Its not hard to get a job here.  That can be good and bad.
Cons: The biggest issue with the company is the management churn.  My manager had three or four different managers over the course of two years.  It makes starting and finishing projects and long-term initiatives very difficult.  You'd think that managers would pick up where the last one left off, but that's not the case.  Each manager is a silo.  As your go further up the chain, the churn gets worse.  Its not that they necessarily leave, its that they move around.  I think they worst effect is that people are not invested in their area because they know they'll leave eventually.  That means that lower-level managers are the only ones who really work in the trenches.  Talking to them is really depressing.  They know any good initiative has a 50/50 chance of fizzing out.

Siloing exists and is terrible.  Managers are not accountable to one another for the most part.  Upper management doesn't resolve issues between them, nor do they care.  There is no cohesive chain-of-command.  Its very loose and whoever is the most charismatic and clever gets the job done.

HR.  We have an HR?  No, we don't.  Who's my HR person?  I have no idea.  There's someone, somewhere.  Probably not at my location.  Never met a single person in HR when I was hired, nor since.  The internal website is the closest thing I have to HR.

The talent pool is atrocious.  People who have no business in technology are here.  Offshore talent is terrible.  Developers who can barely code get jobs pretty easily.  Why, you ask?  Poor managers, sure, but mostly terrible, terrible recruiting.  Horrifically bad.  Their "recruiters" are offshore talent that have no idea about the job or the location.  They can't schedule things properly, and they can't talk to the candidate properly.  Candidate wants to know where to park?  Forget it.  Directions?  Might as well Google it.  Properly scheduled video conferencing room for an interview?  Good luck even getting a room that has a phone.  The recruiters sometimes get a little belligerent.  Decent talent walks away almost immediately.  Good talent doesn't even bother to apply.  And then onboarding takes months.  Employees show up sometimes without having any sort of equipment on the first day.  JPMC got rid of all the Administrative Assistants, so no one has any idea of who to talk to or what to do or where to go.  Its all handled by some ethereal system in the background.  Want to feel like a cog in the machine?  Work here.  If you're the only team member at your location, then you'll sit there and stare at your cubicle walls for days while things may or may be happening.  If there's an issue, there is little notice and even less done.  It takes individuals who actively chase after things to get someone onboarded.  Hiring someone is utterly embarrassing.  My team has had two people leave almost immediately.

Company culture is fake and empty.  Sure there are lots of initiatives and events and videos and training, but its devoid of real caring.  Its all about optics.  They got rid of the long term people that run the various locations, so the replacements are churners who don't care about making a cohesive group.  Its like a commuter workplace.  People come and go.  Upper management smiles a lot.  The good ones move on quickly.  Pounding sand is the number one activity at Chase.

Morale sucks.  Everyone knows the above issues.  And I had it easier than most.  People put on a fake a smile and try to make things work, but inside they're slowly dying.

But hey, the pay is good, the benefits are decent, and your job is pretty safe.   There's something to be said about not living in poverty.  We often take that for granted.