Great people, but process is king
Pros
All teams I have worked with (IT back office) were full of very good, very nice and helpful people. Many of them were also extremely dedicated, putting in the extra effort to get stuff delivered in the timelines posed by the business. All of my immediate line managers (UBS Directors, so VPs elsewhere) were down-to-earth, pragmatical people. All of them cared for their staff and were trying their hardest to develop them. The whole culture of the company encourages helpful relationships based on trust and respect. However, that is most prevalent between peers and line managers and subordinates, relationships of other kinds are not always so great.
Cons
First of all, the processes in place do not help but hinder development. L1 production support can only copy files and click "restart" buttons (and even then they make mistakes far too often), which means that dev teams get woken up in the middle of the night on a regular basis. Release process is excruciatingly painful, because of the aforementioned production support, as devs can't have access to prod. There is no notion of break glass scenarios, and mentioning it is met with immediate refusal. Work-life balance is appalling if one wishes to get promoted. And when that happens the compensation is not nearly enough to cover for the sleepless nights. Business has no idea how IT works and pushes back on any technical changes if they would mean longer delivery times for functional requirements. This leads to tremendous technical debts and poor quality software which is bolted on rather than built. Furthermore, business manages to forget about regulatory requirements and only highlights them at the eleventh hour, causing even more "tactical" solutions to be put in place.
