Company: J-P-Morgan
Date: 2008-10-29
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Good company, poor leadership.
Pros: Banking work is fairly steady and secure, even when the industry is not.  The company has very good benefits and the work environment is fairly relaxed.  Pay is above average in the Seattle area and there are many opportunities to move around within the bank to new positions.
Cons: Market conditions make banking very unstable as an occupation or career choice.  Frequent mergers.  Inside the bank, moving around requires networking, with most opportunities to move up requiring an employee to have "friends in high places."  The bank, while large, is fairly close knit at the management level so any misstep may wreck your future career opportunities   This makes a career at WaMu fairly risky because there is a serious lack of accountability at the senior management levels, with many senior managers creating an environment that can cause projects to fail via bureaucracy and too much process.  There is also a very stark difference between the business organization and the technology organization, with business PMs not having authority over tech PMs.  In addition, there is general confusion in the organization on how to create a Six Sigma-type organization, and many false starts creating process improvement functions over the past 5 years.