Generally a good place but some very mediocre colleagues and some dreadful decision making from MD level +
Pros
1) The base pay is OK-good and the health benefits and pension contributions are good-excellent. BUPA is the health provider and they were excellent. 2) There are some fantastic colleagues who are really talented engineers. 3) The offices are generally very pleasant. 4) Some of the engineering work is really interesting and can be exciting. 5) If you get a good/supportive manager, you can boost your career growth in a shorter time span.
Cons
1) Is there ever a month that goes by in which Deutsche Bank isn't in the news for money laundering? It's demoralising working for an organisation that has a nefarious history and continues to be involved in dodgy activities. With the hundreds of millions spent on KYC processes at DB, it's incredible that such crimes continued to still occur very frequently. 2) The resource planning that I witnessed was at times absolutely absurd. It got to the point where some teams were incredibly stretched working on key deliverables with tight deadlines and with a small team. And yet, DB hired external consultants on several ocassions who would be paid extortinate sums of money to come up with 'digital transformation' ideas that would be executed by DB engineers. So, the company is paying at least twice. That inconsistent approach to resourcing seemed to happen frequently. 3) Some colleagues, especially around the VP level, are medicore and there's a layer of fat who enjoy good benefits which they realistically wouldn't get elsewhere who just stay and do just above the minimum while some really talented juniors get less benefits and tougher objectives. So, it's not really ultra meritocratic although if you really, really want it, you'll tend to get it. Also, at below VP level, no bonuses are paid. 4) Also, the obsession from the senior management and board to get all employees, at least in Germany, COVID vaccinated and describing it as a 'moral obligation' in internal memos was creepy and a gross overreach. How about let employees decide for themselves what is best for their bodies or is that concept too hard for a German company to understand? 5) I experienced some super crazy politics that meant that collective objectives weren't met. At a VP+ level, things can become a bit machiavellian in that what's in the interests for the company aren't necessarily in the interests for your own personal career growth but that's an elephant in the room that everyone ignores. An example may be that a certain legacy system wasn't migrated to a new system because it has some critical functionality and the team supporting the application were fired very quickly in the past for some unknown reasons. By migrating the system and saving the company money, you wouldn't be able to have X budget to keep maintaining that sytem and having a bigger team. So, you would lose headcount and budget by doing what's a positive thing for the company. So objectives need to be better aligned. Also, teams would compete with each other for 'territory' as that would bring in more budget so things get quite odd when officially, you're in the same boat but unofficially, you're conspiring how to 'one up' them all the time. 6) DB engineering tends to build things with the best of intentions and then some new top dog will come in and make wholesale changes, like firing an entire team that supports/maintains some applications, that make the past 2 years of hard work totally pointless and redundant. Technology and ways of doing things do indeed change but the lack of a consistent approach / consistent goal over different eras of Managing Directors results in a bit of a headless chicken effect. 7) It is getting much better but diversity at the top level is still lop-sided. There are measures being taken to address this but there's a long way to go.