Pros
Salary is paid into bank account on time
Cons
It is deeply saddening to watch such a historic institution struggle operationally. Without a fundamental shift in executive oversight, LBG risks continuing to face high-profile IT challenges. From my perspective, the aggressive shift towards offshore IT hubs has negatively impacted our operational stability. From the ground level, this strategy appears to be driven primarily by short-term cost management rather than building robust technical capability. To the decision-makers and stakeholders: the offshore operating model and its internal reporting structures require an immediate, objective review. There is a critical disconnect between the perceived financial savings of offshoring and the actual technical debt being accumulated. From an engineering standpoint, communication structures between offshore and onshore teams often feel opaque. It frequently appears that critical operational issues and systemic challenges are not fully escalated to UK executives before major impacts occur. Because of this reporting disconnect, combined with significant time-zone challenges and a steep learning curve at the offshore hubs, the current setup feels highly inefficient. Experienced UK engineers are continually taking on drastically higher workloads to remediate errors and maintain system stability. Frustratingly, there is a strong perception among UK staff that our extensive remediation work and crisis management are not accurately reflected in executive delivery metrics. This disconnect creates a potentially overly optimistic view of the transition's success at the board level, while masking the true fragility of our infrastructure. The recent IT outages reported in the press reflect these daily operational struggles, and I worry this exposes the bank to unnecessary regulatory scrutiny from the FCA. Additionally, compensation remains below the industry average for tech roles. Instead of being empowered to focus on core engineering work, a significant amount of our time is consumed by administrative bureaucracy and mandatory internal processes that offer little technical value. Morale among the UK tech staff is currently at rock bottom. Many highly capable engineers who hold critical institutional knowledge are choosing to leave, resulting in a severe brain drain. It feels as though long-term operational resilience is being overshadowed by short-term structural changes.