UBS used to be a good company to work for, however nowadays the only focus management has is cost cutting, so management spends most of time figuring out a way to reduce costs and the staff worrying about when their jobs will be moved to a low cost location (i.e. India, Poland, Nashville-TN, etc). The current CFO is a job killer who only thinks about UBS's share price, so he and the rest of the Board can cash in their millions.
For the past 4+ years the only thing management has focused is cost reduction - benefits are gone, and compensation is now below market, as a result the good people continue resigning in bunches everyday. The moral is so dismal that people really do not care about anything else anymore - they just come in for the pay check until they find another job.
A few years ago the Head of HR came up with a non sense employee performance measurement that destroy whatever was left in terms of moral, but he still employed by UBS so you get an idea of how bad management really is.
Career growth at UBS is a thing of the past. Management keeps saying that the jobs in the future will be more interesting, however the only thing people will be doing in a few years is managing the mess created by the offshoring people who have no clue what they are doing. In order to remediate such low quality work provided by UBS's offshore "partners", UBS has more people in Operational Risk, Internal Audit and bureaucratic functions, than actually people doing work and really advising the business and dealing with regulatory issues. If you want to deal with bureacratics who do not understand anything, UBS may be the place for you.
In addition, a lot of Senior Management has resigned lately, but instead of promoting people who are competent and have been loyal to the firm for years UBS continues to bring people from outside, so when they tell you that there is a career growth opportunity think twice about it.
The bottom line is Management does not care about anything other than cost reduction, so if you want to spend most of your time dealing with cost/operational plans, and have stomach to say ok to everything they say that's the perfect place for you.
