Avoid like the plague - full to the rafters of “lifers” who can’t work with anyone who has their own mind
Pros
-Well known name -opportunities for international travel
Cons
- do not joint HSBC if you are a capable, talented, independent minded person. The sort of person who thrives at HSBC are those who are content to follow orders/rules/policies/instructions mindlessly and religiously. This results in swathes of clones without any creativity or talent. - since HSBC has an extremely risk adverse culture, every role is duplicated (at least) so you end up fighting and being forced to play politics to evidence your value versus the other people(s) who have the duplicate of your role. -often where there is a knotty issue internally, they will just hire an external hire to fix it, rather than fix the issue themselves. That is because all the “lifers” as they call themselves have too much as stake to actually make any difficult decisions so they hire an external “newbie” and make it their problem, then act as if that newbie is stupid for not being able to fix the issue (which is squally due to lifer personalities. - the culture breeds such risk as version that people become scared of their own shadow. - very few “leaders” care one iota about anyone in their team. They will posture and say / pretend they do, but will throw anyone underneath them under the bus without a second thought. -the words “throw under the bus” is used daily or even hourly to describe how to sell a colleague out in another team in order to get some political advantage. This gives an idea of how rotten the culture is
