Avoid Fidelity

- Pay is below market, even with bonus and shares. Fidelity is notoriously cheap when it comes to salaries and tech/product budgets. Fidelity would step over a dollar to pick up a dime. - They are being incredibly deceptive about RTO. Every time more RTO gets discussed, it's prefaced with "this will be it", then ends up increasing. People are being punished in their year-end reviews and compensation for not being in the office enough. You are required to RTO even if your team is in other locations and you end up just sitting on zoom the entire time anyway. There is even a post in the Fidelity blind channel that alleges someone lost their WFH exception for taking care of their partner that has cancer. - Hiring standards are abysmal and you will be working with a lot of clueless and underqualified people in tech, especially contractors. A good number of people in architecture and lead positions are nothing more than contractors that were converted over to FTE because they were in the right place at the right time. - The tech stacks are old and terrible. The code repositories are a mess with constant oversight and ownership clashes. There is nothing innovative about anything Fidelity does. - Management and process is bloated and burdensome, even for a financial firm. Anything that could be an email or a teams message will instead be multiple meetings. You will spend so much of your time on Fidelity's bs interpretation of "agile" and attending all these different ceremonies and planning meetings, in addition to all the meetings other teams will try to force you into. - You are very likely to be constantly putting out fires in production due to unrealistic deadlines from product, pressure from management to get "something" in, and coworkers in your team or department that cause more problems than they solve. - Core platform systems constantly break because those teams push out unannounced changes without sufficient testing. The people on the core system teams are some of the worst in the company. - There is a ton of toxic politics especially related to titles. The arrogance level of people at L7 and above is incredible and it's not uncommon for them to ignore or belittle people below them. Titles are extremely bloated and misleading as well. As an example, "Principal Engineer" is basically meaningless, there are people with as little as 4 YOE with this title and just about every contractor that is hired is given this title as well. - You will constantly hear about DEI but then you look around and executives are majority white male, marketing/product is majority white, and tech is majority Indian male. (Note: I am not anti-DEI, just pointing out that what Fidelity does is a complete sham). - Corporate leadership is completely out of touch with just about every issue workers care about. And the lifers at the company just lick their boots and tell everyone else to stop complaining. The only upside is it's incredibly difficult to get fired aside from negligence that causes financial loss (or apparently not coming into the office enough according to rumors). It would even be an okay "coast and collect a paycheck" except you'll be constantly working extra hours dealing with prod issues or meeting deadlines you didn't agree to. #fidelity #fidelityinvestments #fidelitysucks