FactSet Reviews in New York City, NY Area

Pros

Benefits, work/life balance, work from home privileges (note: not all teams have this), very strong engineering culture, smart engineers and capable managers, relatively fair review system, tries to be client driven, strong onboarding plan (new hire training, mentors), innovation encouraged, company will support you resource-wise in "getting things done", relatively little bureaucracy due to PD / engineering division of labor, patience with new hires, excellent in-house managerial training, decent social atmosphere (you have to be here for a while to appreciate it).

Cons

Rigid promotion requirements hinder top performers from faster recognition (for some teams, not all), pay is average to below average for the financial software industry in NYC, in-house technology-oriented training not at the level of managerial training, an initiative needs to be developed to help PDs and engineers collaborate better (I'm serious about this), working in the financial software domain means you don't really understand the end-user (unless you are a banker or money manager), some teams have pager / on call duties, specialization means cross-team moves are less likely.

Advice to Senior Management

FactSet is the best place to work in the financial software industry, despite its shortcomings. I qualify this because the industry may not have the mass appeal as some others such as consumer-facing industries or social networking companies. Nothing you can do about that. Recommendations: make the promotion structure more fluid for high-performing engineers. Pay PDs more, they deserve it. You are not a mediocre company but you pay like one; raise your average pay to be in the top 10-15 percentile in the industry. You have a ton of free cash flow, make sure you do everything you can - not only pay, but also benefits, promotions, training, and compelling work - to keep your top performers motivated and challenged.

Pros

-Easy to get hired (simple interview process, recruit at both strong and mediocre schools
-Strong ability to network with professionals in financial services
-Social environment may be desirable to those who still want to be in college

Cons

-Work is cumbersome, not stimulating, and menial
-Creative/novel ideas are dismissed, management sticks to the status quo
-You are basically a call center and will continue to be on phone support for your first 2 years
-No tasks in this position actually feel important (you answer helpdesk calls, email clients asking them to meet you so you can show them new product features - and most of them turn you down)
-"Client visits" often make you feel unimportant because often times your clients simply do not care that they have FactSet on their computers and wondering why you insisted on showing up in person
-The worst part is how complacent everyone is - I can put in 50% of the effort as the person next to me, but we will be considered for promotion after we hit a certain amount of time, NOT after we demonstrate professional growth and accomplishments

Advice to Senior Management

-Stop masquerading a call center as a consulting hub and leading employees on
-Increase pay and offer performance bonuses to consultants
-Open your minds to new solutions, some consultants actually have good ideas - use them!

Pros

Encourages independence, creativity, and ownership

Cons

Bad compensation. Departments are disjointed, you could have no idea what the person next to you does

Pros

Work with really cool people, who are of comparable age. Employees here are very nice and fun to work with.

Cons

No adjustment of salary (COLA) for working in NYC. Starting salary was the same across all offices in the US, so a clear disadvantage if you are hired for the NY office.

Advice to Senior Management

Be honest about compensation in upcoming periods. Either increase base salary or provide some incentive for employees. For a job in the financial services industry, the pay is very poor.

Pros

Free Lunch; Flexible working schedule

Cons

lack of communication from middle management

Advice to Senior Management

More transparecy in the review process. More direction needed. Managers need management training.

Pros

Relaxed atmosphere and interesting people

Cons

Ineffective performance reviews and not adequate monetary recognition

Pros

Great work environment, they do a great job of hiring talented individuals. Non-aggressive environment that encourages personal growth as a young person. Diverse products that give you exposure to many different areas in the financials markets.

Cons

There is not much clarity with your future at FactSet. You can never get a straight answer from management about growth opportunities. Compensation is a black box for sales, and aggressive sales people aren't appropriately rewarded for their efforts. There is definitely a boys club here that doesn't welcome new members. There is a lot of money that can be made for FactSet, but they fail to recognize the young and eager that aspire to move up in the ranks.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide more clarity for tenured employees in terms of careear progression and compensation. Over the next few years as the markets improve there will be diffifcult to retain these employees.

Pros

Free lunch. Flexibility. If you put your time in and meet your goals, you can work independently. Team environment. Positive young company.

Cons

Probably could be higher in pay. Senior management isn't as involved as they should be with the day to day and have a mentality of "nice job, but let's get to the next goal" Their goals are not always realistic.

Advice to Senior Management

Spend more time with consultants and sales to understand the challenges facing the day to day work. Also be understanding of current enviroment and difficulty it presents for selling.

Pros

* Great health insurance, dental, 401k
* Free lunch from Mon - Thu
* Free drinks and snacks
* Very healthy environment
* Rapid growth
* Pay for CFA

Cons

* Path of growth is limited; Specialist just means you're a support and sales hybrid

* The quality of Development and Engineers are so inconsistent. A few are sheer geniuses and too many inept developers and engineers.

* Development and engineering structure does not make sense; lack of cohesive development process.
Why are we recreating features in other applications that we already have in existing applications?

* I feel bad for our clients when they face very buggy softwares and bad quality data.

Advice to Senior Management

Development needs critical help. A lot of people from acquired firms get promoted to higher development positions even they are ill-equipped for the job. They carry with them their poor process and structure or lack thereof.

Products and databases should be well linked and not replicated. Also, I don't understand why we are paying money for information we already have in our database. Stop partnering with data vendors with sub-par quality data. Just read the enhancement requests and you can hear the clients screaming at the quality of our products and lack of data integrity.

At the route development and engineering is going, small companies with better development process will eventually take over. We can at least gather quality data since that is our future.

Pros

Great Work/Life Balance and friendly atmosphere

Cons

Hard to make alot of money

Advice to Senior Management

n.a