Citi Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Citi full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Diverse, Flexibility, vast opportunities, smart people

Cons – salary, some departments are not as modern as others

Advice to Senior Management – Salary adjustments based on market conditions

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Citi full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Good benefits, variety of jobs and positions, opportunity to be a part of creative problem solving, fair working policies, and HR practices.

Cons – If you don't like change or high standards, this is not the company to work for. The change/standards were generally practical and made good business sense.

Advice to Senior Management – Continue to keep the lower level staff in the loop of what is going as much as possible. With all the changes taking place to accommodate business needs, keeping the staff informed is going to save you a lot of turnover and disgruntled workers.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Citi full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Was part of rotational program so got to learn different areas of technology

Cons – Little Laid back environment.
Need to have good training programs for New Analyst

Advice to Senior Management – Need to have good training programs

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Citi full-time for less than a year

Pros – Good benefits and on campus amenities.

Cons – Realized the on campus amenities are so you never have an excuse to leave.
Never felt so undervalued as an employee.
Bad apples are left to spoil the bunch, even when the manager admits to knowing they are there.
Systems are so antiquated, you do very manual processes.
50+ hour weeks is the norm. Including coming in on occasional Saturdays. I have seen senior managers working well in excess of 60 hours and coming in on weekends.
Very poor work/life balance.
Strong individual contributors are promoted to lead, but turn out to be terrible leaders.
Never been so unimpressed with management.
Tiny desks to work at.
Bureaucracy that rivals the federal government.
Outsourcing more jobs to India.

Advice to Senior Management – I know you are busy trying to save the company and get off of government welfare, but you are working your people very hard with very little reward. Fixing your technology problems is a good start. 8 settlement systems really? No one had the foresight to think, hmmm maybe merging these would be a good idea? Fix your bureaucracy problem, that will cut labor costs significantly. I once needed 8 approvals to get access to a new system. Try telling your employees you think they are valuable even if it is a lie. Didn't even get that much. Never felt so undervalued. I turned in my two weeks notice and have never felt so good.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Citi full-time

Pros – None. If you only care about the paycheck, it might be acceptable. But there are no other upsides, particularly if you actually want to care about or find fulfillment in what you do.

Cons – This will likely sound like the rantings of a disgruntled employee, but as a human being, I beg you: do not come to work at Citi.

The company perfectly fits the stereotype of a massive decentralized organization characterized by stifling bureaucracy. Employees are almost universally unhappy, save for the paycheck, and there is no management or human resources support when problems arise. Operations at the company work through endless recurring conference calls filled with buzzwords like "leverage," "use cases," and "workstream," but no results are ever achieved and no tasks are actually completed.

Because of the size and global spread of the company and the fact that most employees work from home, managers essentially answer to no one, and it's genuinely possible for employees to completely disappear within the system. Human resources are inaccessible -- if they exist at all -- and getting help with something as simple as a desk to work at and a computer that actually works are left completely up to the individual employee to figure out. There is no ability to advance to a higher role or even a different group: once you're planted in a slot, that's where you're expected to be, for years on end if necessary.

From my experience, no matter what interviewers and hiring coordinators say, job descriptions given to potential employees have no actual relationship to what employees are actually expected to do - in large part because managers operate without any sense of strategic direction, and bodies are just thrown at meaningless projects without any sense of reasoning or applicable skills. Regardless of the nature of the work, everything is done in Excel spreadsheets containing meaningless data, and there is no sense of employee loyalty to the company or to one's co-workers.

Employees refuse to respond to emails or phone messages, and even when meetings are scheduled, individuals completely ignore them, because there is no management penalty or monitoring. Projects are initiated with no sense of timeline or goals - or even a sense of "why are we doing this?" - and frequently discussing the status of projects on conference calls is viewed as a more acceptable substitute than actually getting something done. Individuals frequently ignore deadlines and refuse to collaborate on group projects, because every individual work unit only answers to itself, and upper management has no recourse over individual groups to force results. Meanwhile, even items requiring first-level managers to take the simplest action go completely ignored for months on end - which is actually fine, because no one within the company cares about what others in the company do anyway.

Regardless of the fact that this sounds like a rant, please, as a human being, I beg you to take this seriously: do not come to work at Citi. I have loved every job I ever took before I began working at Citi, and only agreed to come on board to relocate to another area for family reasons. I regret it every day, and regretted it from the very first week. Do not work at Citi. If you care at all about what you do, it will ruin you.

Advice to Senior Management – Don't lie to potential employees about what their job will entail or what the company will do for them just to get them on board. If they knew the truth, they would never come to work for you, but you have a responsibility to be honest.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Citi

Pros – very good place to start out, lots of different opportunities and lots of people around to learn from. A much better work culture then most places on the street.

Cons – compensation may not be the highest on the street.

Current Employee – been working at Citi full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – Roles consistently 'punch above their weight' in terms of the opportunities to run products or big pieces of business one has at early stages of their careers.

Cons – Like many large firms, Citi has it's share of bureaucracy and politics. Learn the process, and then figure out when you need to beg for forgiveness or permission.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep focused on the customer and client.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Citi full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Nice people.Some thing for everyone if you want to work here.

Cons – Very low on salary.Some senior management gets away with favoritism.

Advice to Senior Management – Be fair to your internal people when they are working for you and not when they threaten to leave you.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Citi full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – This company is good career builder.

Cons – This company pay low salary.

Advice to Senior Management – pay according to experience

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Citi

Pros – Growth opportunity. Strong steady company

Cons – Appears some managers may feel threatened by individuals with advanced degrees.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend