Pros
The buy side is a good place to work in general, but there are other better places to do it than UBS GAM. They provide good resources for investment research, and there is no travel budget limits.
Cons
The organization claims meritocracy, yet best performance is not rewarded, and underperformers somehow manage to stick around. For instance the manager of one group is leader of a product that has underperformed for five years, he fired two analysts despite the reason for underperformance being his quant model, then two years later he gets rid of an entire other product team even though it had the same amount of assets and a much better track record (outperformed every year but one, and even in that year 40th percentile). Having constant negative headlines about the problems at the company ranging from losing money, to being bailed out by the Swiss government, to allegedly supporting tax fraud in the US really has an impact on morale. I never thought it would, but it did affect how I felt about working there. They claim diversity, but the only people in charge are white men. I realize that is not uncommon, but don't preach diversity and then blatantly disregard it.
