Barclays reviews

BarCap boasts one of the most sterile and politicized environments you will ever see in the investment banking industry (admittedly this will suit some candidates). Barcap is also a notorious revolving door. This is true to varying extents of the entire IB industry, but Barcap take it to extremes - fixed redundancy cycles run every two years or so (this is unofficial, of course), and if you're made redundant from BarCap make no mistake - it was not redundancy, you were 'not wanted'. The endless redundancy cycle is the company's way of safely removing those that "did not fit in" without fear of litigation. This 'unofficial' policy has led to Barcap having the largest internal HR presence in the London IB industry. Nepotism abounds, and you will find silos of surprisingly incompetent permanent staff that survive solely due to patronage from above. Line manager's are 'encouraged' not to give negative appraisals in these cases; in general the performance management system is based less on merit than on 'who you know'. if you're an efficient and able networker, you may be able to go far. The flip side of this is that you don't want to disagree with anyone - because if you do, you can guarantee you'll be on the next redundancy list. This is not a company for you if you believe in speaking your mind.

- Processes and bureaucracy - e.g. it takes several weeks to become productive - have a working PC with access rights and software. And this is just one example - Interaction with other teams (e.g. DBA, IT support, app servers support, other dev teams) - often need to send several chaser emails, otherwise you get ignored. This got progressively worse with time, but you might get lucky and get more responsive people. - Quarterly mandatory trainings that are 90% irrelevant to IT people, are a waste of everyone's time and are mostly there so that the firm would fulfill the terms of yet another plea agreement with DOJ (or whoever it settled with this time). - No budget for any real training opportunities - technical or business, besides the basics, but you can get Pluralsight subscription, which is better than nothing. - Outsourced support to India and Mexico with staff of dubious quality (technical and/or language) and high turnover. Many support people don't know the systems and often don't want to learn. As a result developers on level 2 duty get swamped with issues that should be dealt with by level 1 people. This eats into your deliverables for the sprint. - Change management - God forbid you must coordinate/deploy changes into production or UAT (yes, testing) environments regularly - the effort to document and push it through could easily exceed the actual change you did many times over. Only to do it 2 more times because team 3 out of 5 didn't approve your change in the system in time because you didn't chase them enough. If you are pure developer and only push code to version control then you're fine and spared of this. - Tooling - collaboration tools are a mess, ancient IRC-like clone for chat, disparate (and often broken) systems for online meetings and videocalls. - Feeling like working in silos, little visibility of other teams and your own contribution, but this is supposedly getting better - Limited career progression once you reach AVP - it is a "catch all" position where you can find people with anywhere between 3 and 13 years relevant experience. - No budget for business travel or technical conferences. You can work with teammates daily for years without ever meeting them in person. - Unless you're promoted, you get about inflation level pay rise for very good performance, otherwise below that, if any. - Bonuses vary, but rarely exceed one monthly salary, often below that, if any, also they're paid in April for the previous year so they keep you on the hook longer should you decide to abandon ship