Company: J-P-Morgan
Date: 2019-01-15
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Good, Stable Job with Competitive Pay But Not Much Else
Pros: JP Morgan is a good place to start a career in Technology, they have a decent graduate programme where candidates are evaluated on potential and not just current technical skillset. Career progression is quite straightforward for the first couple of years albeit every 2 years. People are generally nice although experience could vary dramatically between teams. Work-life balance is similar to other places where people get well established so things like working from home are common for the Glasgow office. Laid-back culture and no dress code. Technology processes are decent to a certain standard but you could see a wide difference between teams. Pension benefits are pretty good with 6% matched contribution and also you get private healthcare in your pay package.  They use a good amount of open source software so a lot of transferable skills relating to technology
Cons: Old technologies, legacy or at least very old code (10+ years) which was written a lot by people with no software engineering training. This has resulted in a very brittle code in places and the business never puts massive importance on tackling the core issues of something like this and pretty much always looks in a 1-year delivery and no further. Because of the size of JP Morgan, there is a lot of red tape for certain things so sometimes accomplishing a simple task (e.g. rebooting a box or updating a DB) could feel like a monumental task. Let alone trying to get access to another system.  There is also a total disconnect between higher management and the actual teams. Most of the senior leaders are not based in Glasgow which very much feels like you are in a secondary location with not much to hope for. Moreover, your salary is almost always determined by people who essentially meet you like twice a year which I find quite confusing and irrational. Finally, career progression after the first 5-7 years is pretty much not there for a lot of people. I am not sure if the pay goes that much either.