Barclays Capital Reviews in Singapore, Singapore Area

Pros

- Great training provided. Further learning is encouraged.
- Good benefits
- Good diversity initiatives
- Depending on manager and team - very open culture. Senior management can be easily approached.
- You are given responsibility for your work and allowed to manage it.

Cons

- Very London driven. Teams in Asia just tend to be the ones implementing someone else's vision.
- Quality of technical work is not high. Mainly system patching and maintenance.
- High pressure environment. Need to make sure fingers are never pointed at you.
- Too much process driven. Unnecessary to a large extent.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop being so London centric. Allow other locations to take on initiatives and responsibility.

There is an initiatve amongst IT management to hold regular online chats with the technology staff. That is a very good initiative and should be continued and extended to the levels below as well.

Pros

Good salary for an IT person

Cons

Managers are spending most of their time creating administration overhead, justifying this way their existence. For each task, one has to follow so many rules and procedures, which often contradict each other. Failing to comply any of them, will draw upon you a witch-hunt storm. Frequent uncompensated overtime is implied.

Advice to Senior Management

Significant attitude change is required to prevent mass exodus

Pros

Growing firm, some smart people on the sales desk. Good training program. Some very good management.

Cons

Promotions often dependent on who you know and not necessarily merit based. Plenty of internal politics often hinder your own progress, very territorial.

Advice to Senior Management

Let good candidates progress in their career instead of hoarding and hindering them

Pros

Great place to get solid financial knowledge. Opportunities plenty to work and improve on your leadership and management skills

Cons

Not so great of an appraisal system. Visibility is the key to everything. If you are visible then you are there if not its a done deal.

Advice to Senior Management

Not all people are cut out to be the same. Need to assess the individuals capabilities before allocating tasks to them

Pros

Good base pay, reasonable franchise, great team of traders and sales staff who generate the revenue, excellent teamwork, great communication and understanding between desks, sales and trading.

Cons

too much middle management who produce nothing, dip into the bonus pool, engage in politics, back stabbing, and generally interfere with otherwise successfully run businesses.
Rate of growth slowing, middle management clutching at straws to justify their existence, at detriment to morale. I'd expect a mass exodus soon!They have no strategic insight to grow the business, do nothing but hire graduates and interns, and fire experienced money making staff, to give the appearance they're improving the bottom line.

Advice to Senior Management

Cull middle management, too many layers of people doing nothing trying to justify their own existence, interfering, and destroying morale. Middle managements meddling with businesses, firing successful, money making traders, and bringing in graduates is short sighted and will do nothing but destroy morale, and court disaster next time the markets fall into turmoil. I've seen the impact first handed.

Pros

Compensation is very good. Relocation package is also very good. Lot of focus on learning the business is extreamly positive speacially for the IT folks. Regular training and knowledge sharing sessions are conducted.

Cons

The senior management completely lacks the vision for the company. Singapore center is nothing but a strategy to replace the vendors with an offshore development center. The employees are treated just like resources and they are not at all a part of the "Global Barclays Team".
The processes in place are just like any other typical services company. To make it more complicated, the processes (documentation) are only meant for Singapore team and not for the London team (strange!!!!).
The appraisal process is completely flawed. The grades and rating are decided even before the meeting with the manager. All your manager does is conveys the grade to you and there is no discussion on it.
Only way to succeed is to have good relation with your AE (some jargon post for the technical lead). Your manager has absolutely no say what so ever in your appraisal. (again very strange way of working).

Advice to Senior Management

please try to bring the global corporate culture at Singapore development center. It would be a great place to work for.

Pros

1) Brand Name
2) Progressive product structures - great learning experience
3) Good international exposure in certain divisions (while working in the Singapore office)

Cons

1) Lack of capacity planning - leading to short-handed teams working unreasonable hours (within Middle Office and Operations)
2) Significant differences in the management and communication style across various divisions - leading to uneven company culture
3) Lack of a structured Graduate Program (as promised) as compared to various other banks such as Deutsche, HSBC or Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior Management is doing a decent job from my perspective. Middle management staff need to get their act together and start behaving like they belong to the same organisation, as opposed to being individualistic at the expense of employee morale

Pros

5.5 months maternity leave, a better work life balance area.

Cons

The culture of the company aims to provide all types of benefits for employees in terms of work related (providing course and new systems). However, when it comes to personal benefits, it is limited as compared to other companies.

Advice to Senior Management

Do not listen only to what employees say. Look at what they have contributed on a daily basis. Alot of higher management people only listen to what they want, have faith in people who are articulate and visible. Sadly, most of these people are not the ones who work but just use their mouth to work their way up.