Very Nice Environment to Work, with Caveats
Pros
I really like the culture and work environment at Mastercard. In particular I would describe it as respectful, considerate, friendly, supportive and fun. There are pretty good benefits and the work content is pretty good - challenging but not overly-so. Work-life balance is good, which I appreciate. I'm pretty happy at Mastercard, and on balanced I'm more happy here than I have been at just about any other job I've had before.
Cons
The biggest complaint I have is around people (typically senior people) scheduling meetings at 6am, and I've even seen 5:30am. I find this frankly offensive and shows a careless, reckless and thoughtless disregard. It also shows a tremendous amount of ignorance as it's now shown that disrupting people's sleep is a health hazard (read the book "Why we Sleep" by a Harvard medical professor). I'm actually left angry when I receive these reckless meeting invites. An example - one of my colleagues from a different group got an invite to a 5am or 6am meeting from her manager on the day she returned from vacation. She didn't even sleep that night because of the stress of having to get up so early. It turned out that the meeting was a completely routine, unimportant group meeting and her attendance was barely required, but the manager invited her because he was careless thoughtless and reckless - he even acknowledged that he knew it was 'early' but did so anyway. If you need to do some Global call, then schedule two meetings - making it convenient for everyone for at least one of those two meetings. Otherwise don't even invite people whose time zone is before 8am. There's quite a bit of reverse discrimination at work, where I see female employees promoted disproportionately. People will argue with this but just providing my feedback. There are a lot of very effective and talented female senior managers at work, but there are a lot of clueless, inept ones too. On a related note, most promotions are in the headquarters of St. Louis and Purchase - orders of magnitude fewer are in other offices which is giving me pause on staying at MC. The Voya retirement plan does not allow a proper self-directed option. I hate this - I can move to TD Ameritrade but only to buy additional set of mutual funds. This is not useful to me. This is actually causing me to look at other job opportunities, as if/when I leave I can then roll this account into a proper self-directed account. If this Voya restriction were lifted I would be much more likely to stay at MC and no longer look for another job. There are no stock options really - equity component of compensation is crap or non-existent. Vesting schedule is 3 years? WTF - unheard of crap. payment to employees for patents is laughable. I used to get several thousand dollars for my patents in my last job. the MC payment is an insult. i won't even put my name on a patent at MC again - feels insulting to take such a low payment for the innovations. Senior Management makes very poor bets on opportunities - not enough investment, the PME process to overcome threshold to make investments is too high.- too much busy work. Meanwhile silly and obviously pathetic investment opportunities like MasterPass are funded - what a waste of money and no accountability.
