Company: J-P-Morgan
Date: 2016-12-04
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

It's the largest bank, with all the pros and cons
Pros: It's the largest bank in US - and a brand name that you may love as a consumer, so you may be proud of being employed by it. Benefits and pay are good, not the highest but reasonable. Working with customers in a branch is probably great, but working in IT may be a mix of positives and negatives. If you like being in the company there are internal mobility options and you may find job security for many years, if that is what you want.
Cons: It's the largest bank in US - and as such, there is incredible amount of bureaucracy, administrative work and process issues. Hence, work in many departments and especially IT may be a lot more hectic, busy and stressful than what you would see elsewhere in the software industry. A developer may be ok, but leads and app dev managers experience constant stress, busy schedules filled up with meetings, work with hard-liner project managers with outdated management methodology, and in many cases exposure to a lot of negativism by people impacted by location strategy or stressed out by their managers or deadlines, pushing everyone to complete new urgent tasks that sometimes may not even make sense.

At the app dev manager level there is unlimited amount of meetings, administrative work and urgent emails with ad-hoc requests that you cannot ignore. Being in meetings all the time, your capacity for handling other requests quickly gets maxed out, and with changing priorities you have to pick what will not get done or will be delayed, or you can choose to sacrifice all your personal time and constantly catch up on nights and weekends. At the same time you have to also work with the development teams, so it is critical that you have strong leads that can interface more with the developers, as you would rarely have time for that if you are constantly busy with administrative work and urgent requests by the management. Prioritization and delegation are key, if you have resources to whom to delegate non-technical administrative work. You may or may not get such resources though, which for a large bank is surprising, when all you may need is just couple of more people.

Summing it up, it is a stressful experience that can also be rewarding, provided that you are well-staffed and you if you balance your priorities well. If you come from software development background however, which is the most optimal case for such positions, you may not be satisfied with the amount of administrative vs. technical work. And in the end even if all is good there are also external factors that you cannot avoid, like major org changes and moves of whole departments to different locations. Work in a large bank is very different than software companies or startups that are more focused on the actual work, so it's a matter of what kind of work and stress you prefer, administrative and process related or focus on the technical work.