Tech divisions lag the market in tooling, processes, comp, management, leadership, dev experience.
Pros
The benefits packages are fully-featured and health insurance is affordable. The best perk of Fidelity is the 7% 401k match and the 10% annual profit sharing; 17% contributions to your 401k overall each year. The work/life balance ends up being very reasonable - it would be uncommon to work a 45-hour workweek more than a few times a year. 40 hours is the very common norm.
Cons
Fidelity does not use public cloud, which has many negative side-effects; they attempt to replicate that experience with older, internal tooling which dramatically slows developer velocity. For example, engineer's ability to access compute resources is blocked by request processes. Libraries are all subject to a security review which can take a small number of weeks if requested with priority, or many weeks without. Licenses are purchased by a remote requisitions team with a similarly slow resolution timeframe. Releases are produced manually, there is no continuous deployment. There is no universal devops/platform team, squads maintain their own services. This self-sufficiency produces isolation, practically and socially; process standards and tooling varies a fair amount between them. There is no architecture team or unified technical leadership group. Each squad has their own tech lead and that's it. Pay for engineers lags the market, targeting approximately 80-100% of the market rate. There is no option to acquire equity. "Chairman shares" are offered to top performers, but those are simply 2-year vesting cash bonus - not actual equity. Anecdotally, the very talented engineers remain due to not knowing their own market value. The manager-to-report ratio can vary wildly, 50+:1 in some cases, offering virtually no manager facetime or development opportunities to members of those squads. The daily routine of managers and directors is primarily comprised of liaising with customers (other business units) rather than anything related to developing their engineering teams. Because the tech groups service internal business units, customer requirements are often poorly defined, change frequently and are conveyed verbally to product managers over calls. Oftentimes a change will be reverted due to a customer's whim, not the functionality of the feature itself. Leadership is adamant about working from the office and will not support remote work post-covid. Leadership has frequent messaging about undergoing an agile transformation, yet none of the shortcomings described here are eligible for reevaluation. The remaining set of factors that can be changed are virtually meaningless in impact. Talented top-level leadership want to lead other business units which are revenue centers (all are financial business units) rather than cost centers, so the tech groups end up with a steady rotation of SVPs (the head of the tech group, equivalent to a CEO elsewhere) every 1-2 years. In short, the engineer experience at Fidelity is stable, yet slow, uninspiring, and poorly-compensated when compared to the broader market.
