Come here for the people and the experience, leave for better compensation and advancement.
Pros
1. The people: working at BNPP is like hanging out with your family (a moderately dysfunctional one). In the back office in particular, it's a very congenial environment, people get along very well with each other on a personal level. 2. Benefits: while we are compensated worse and get less time off than the French at HO, our time off for the US market is pretty great. They recently bucketed all paid time off into one group (including sick days), but if you take care of your health and wash your hands regularly, you have 24 days a year to play with at worst (analyst level), and at best 34 (VP/Director/MD level). If you hang around for 15 years, you get 5 days more than you had, regardless of title. 3. Experience: Good place to start and acquire knowledge.
Cons
1. Compensation. You are likely to be given ten times more responsibility WAY before you ever get a bump in your salary. All compensation is reviewed by Paris HO and there is no global standard. Compensation varies greatly by department/manager and more often than not, people who do less work make more money. Title change does not necessarily reflect salary increase. 2. Very French-centric. Not speaking French here will get you nowhere. There is a French person sitting at the top of almost every totem pole and the French advance and are promoted, expat'd and compensated much faster than any American. Many Americans who have managed to reach the top get there totally disgruntled and when you complain about compensation, the typical response is "Welcome to my world". It's great that they understand your qualms, but it's almost as though you are expected to go through the same pain as they did in order for it to have been earned. 4. HR could really use some help. Their processes are archaic and mandated by Paris HR which has a completely different employee retention culture than the US. 3. Huge lack of ownership. A lot of people here stay here because it's so easy to fly under the radar, not many people take responsibility for projects and run with it, and when there is a mistake, everyone points a finger at someone else. Many employees here are not interested in excelling, they are not interested in working hard, they are not interested in staying past 4:59pm. The pro to this is that if you do work hard and want to excel, it's MUCH easier to get noticed and excel. However, you'll still get more responsibility way before you get paid for it.
