FIS reviews

FIS management is incompetent and creates a dysfunctional environment where the people are overworked, underpaid, and talent bleeds left and right. Corporate likes to pretend they're having massive gains every year by firing people and spreading their workload among their team members, therefore artificially bumping profits. If this were done within the context of having excess staff or out of pragmatic efficiency, it wouldn't be bad. However, this is being done over and over to already-understaffed teams. This even happens multiple times to the same team, where a team of four suddenly becomes a team of two. The remaining two do not receive compensation for the additional workload not in their job descriptions, and on top of that are forced to either (or both if this happens enough times) rush out half-baked work or work weekends and afternoons to compensate for what essentially boils down to doing the job of multiple people. There he said/she said stories about management shrugging it off as "if they're willing to work that much for such little pay, we're not going to argue." This toxic work environment has led to many talented people leaving the company out of frustration, leaving people who are more complacent and less innovative, therefore stagnating departments, driving down the business in the long-term. So much attrition kills morale, stresses people out, and creates a cycle of attrition. I know of at least two people who were suffering from extreme stress that physically affected their well-being, one, holding a senior position, decided to finally call it quits realizing it's not worth his/her health. This ended up leading to a couple of others in the team quitting simply because FIS wanted to spread out the senior role between the team, which was already understaffed. This led to others under him/her quitting, creating a catastrophe. I only recommend FIS to people who are starting their careers and are looking for a first job. Doing so much builds a great experience base which will impress recruiters when looking for a real job. I only recommend staying long enough that will earn you the knowledge to find a functional company. You are a number to FIS that they'd cut in a nanosecond if they thought it wouldn't break anything in the short-term; it's not worth it, and in fact it quickly becomes an opportunity cost. To give a more personal example: I suffered this similar slice-and-dice penny-pinching, ultimately ending up doing the job of a veteran senior software engineer manager who was already doing his job and the job of a lower-ranked software engineer who was fired, from a team that even then was overbooked. This came with a pathetic bump in pay only after requesting for it. I was not granted a title increase or promotion. Once I decided I had had enough, I left the firm and landed a job that gave me a senior title, almost doubled my compensation, and only has me doing my job according to my job description, not anyone else's. My experience is incredibly similar to others who also left the firm. This is not even mentioning things like no bonuses, ancient technology, ancient DevOps, very little testing, reluctance to allocate resource to up-and-coming products, increasingly cutting events like summer outings, and my personal last straw, which was not giving anyone raises this year despite record-level inflation. They can, however, afford to hire John Legend to play the piano in one of their conferences. Wonder what he's buying with our raises.

Since FIS bought Worldpay and replaced our previous ways of working and senior managers, the culture has become toxic. The focus has moved from delivering excellent products to our customers and supporting our engineers, to cost-cutting and compliance. Regarding cost-cutting, the company is treating engineers so very badly in order to force them to leave and be replaced with cheap unskilled labour in India. Just a few examples (I have lots more): removing the engineers training budget, no bonuses or pay rises in 2021 (after spending ~1 Billion on dividends and share buy-backs) or not promoting or giving pay rises to our graduates after HR promised it to them when they started the graduate programme. We have a low trust environment, where teams have very little say in how to work or what technologies to use. Treating engineers like code-monkeys with different external groups of "expert" enterprise architects telling them how to do their job. This is enforced with a system of "extreme bureaucracy", with products being audited 3 or 4 times per year (as the teams in charge of them cannot be trusted). To summarise, Worldpay was a decent place to work before FIS. Right now is once of the worst places to work in UK as an engineer.