Fidelity Investments Reviews

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

Pros – Good compensation and benefits. Beautiful campus.

Cons – Management skills are not measured or appreciated. Position is more often political and based on who you know rather than qualifications. Mismanagement has resulted in a entirely dysfunctional IT organization that is hobbled by a bizarre anti Microsoft sentiment that is supposedly present at the highest levels. Company spends millions trying to integrate mismatched solutions rather than just adopting any single vendor. Used to be a technology leader but is currently technology schizophrenic. This company also used to develop its management leaders internally, those days have seemingly ended with recent management additions brought in form various other Wall Street firms.

Advice to Senior Management – Implement management quality metrics and start eliminating management dead wood. Start promoting longtime employees who really understand the problems inherent to Fidelity's current culture. Also, Ned is obviously in age related decline (physically and mentally), its time.....

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

Former Employee – worked at Fidelity Investments full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – Co-workers are pleasant and accommodating for the most part. Work environment is clean and well kept.

Cons – Top heavy HR and management at all levels have created an environment where fear is the motivator. Knowledge, skill, and experience are not factors in determining raises and promotions. Managers and some co-workers who seek attention from management will agree to any ridiculous request and deadline. This company has lost many high quality employees and will continue down this long and slippery slope until they figure out how to create a real team culture.

Advice to Senior Management – 1. Get rid of the "semper fidelis" statement in your company description. It is insulting to all current and former Marines that a pathetic organization like Fidelity - one that is clueless as to the meaning of those words and even more clueless about the meaning of esprit de corps - to use the Marine Corps motto in any way, shape, or form.
2. You've ruined Fidelity, now it's time to look for other good companies to ruin.
3. Find another man like Ned Johnson to lead the company.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Fidelity Investments full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Tough to satisfy the 20 word minimum talking about the pros of this company. Covered parking, on site gym.

Cons – IT department is unfocused, disorganized; management is absolutely amoral and contemptuous. The pay is a few dollars less than insulting. Bureaucracy and ego take precedence over any creativity or even common sense.

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

Former Employee – worked at Fidelity Investments full-time for less than a year

Pros – Job security, health insurance is expensive, work/life balance is not good.

Cons – Micro management, mandatory overtime, incompetent management

Advice to Senior Management – Learn to do the job you are put in charge of

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

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

Pros – Good 401K Match and Profit Sharing, health insurance. Vacation - 3 weeks to start - 4 after 5 years and holidays

Cons – Toxic work environment, Some people never break a sweat while others are burried. If you work hard, you are expected to work harder and are never rewarded.

Advice to Senior Management – Stop trying to change things every year. The yearly campaigns are a huge waste of effort. Look at the few things that work and let them grow. Respect and treat the employees as individuals.

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

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

Pros – Good benefits, lots of structure

Cons – Bureaucratic, slow-paced, and hypocritical. Watch "Office Space" for an idea of what it's like working in IT

Advice to Senior Management – Don't say you reward asking questions and taking risks when in reality it is frowned upon

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

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

Pros – Great name brand that people seem to trust, for now. Free coffee. Well, that's about it folks.

Cons – The mangers at the branch could care less about the clients and their assets. It is all about what the account executives are doing with the clients money. Get that money invested at all costs. Stick 'em in mutual funds, annuities or PAS managed program so they can charge them fees. Fidelity investors do not realize they are being duped by purchasing their no load funds. Why? Because their funds tend to have higher turnover ratios that in turn allow their fund managers to perform trades. This equates to significant trading costs that are not disclosable under current law. Investors only see the fund expenses and forget the hidden fees. Do you really think they are going to give good advixe and not be charging you anything people? Really? Furthermore, they treat their superstar higjly experienced people the same as the ones they are getting rid of. It's all about brown nosing at that place. Quality employees leave within 24 months. The bad ones stay because they cannot get hired anywhere else. Their micro management, cukture of fear and intimidation, and peanuts for pay make this place highly avoided by the top 10% of financial advisors from other firms.

Advice to Senior Management – Stop promoting morons due to their brown nosing, tenure, or incompetence. If you are that scared to hire or promote quality people because you fear they will show you up, well, they will anyway. How? The way several of us in the top 25 national rank did when we all left you while scrathed your heads in disbelief. Reason? We can make more income, not jeopardize our integrty to the
client by cutting their grass rather than working for this organization that's hell bent on seeing how many top quality people they can hire for the cheapest dollar only to watch them succedd then resign while on top! Take your head out of your butts and remove your ego or else when this market turns you will be left with the bottom 5% of morons in which you deserve. You people absolutely suck!

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

Former Employee – worked at Fidelity Investments full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – Great 401k matching, year-end bonus & shares. Good health benefits. Some quality people still work there.

Cons – Comparatively low salary, unless you come in at a certain level. I was at Fidelity for several years -- in the beginning I was excited to be there, and I got great reviews and I moved up, and I did meet some really good people, so I thought there was a future there for me. But after seeing behind the curtain and realizing every part of the business was messed up, I jumped ship when the opportunity presented itself.

In every business unit I was in, I saw a shocking lack of leadership. Projects are started and stopped in a haphazard, wasteful way based on whichever direction the political wind is blowing. Projects take years to complete when they shouldn't, and sometimes things launch and then they are immediately discarded. Or subpar work -- the standards, when you are talking about technology or communications or design, are way too low for a company of this size and reputation -- is allowed to launch and is weirdly celebrated. The website is terrible, and the technology at Fidelity is frighteningly behind, yet they spend billions on it every year.

Many VPs (and there are oh-so-many) are afraid to say what they think, so naturally everyone underneath them is. People who move slowly and don't make waves are rewarded. People who suggest new ways to approach things are often viewed as threatening by people who have been sitting comfortably in their roosts for too long. Very little actual work gets done and I think Fidelity customers would be shocked to see how much money is wasted by this company on people who are paid way too much for producing way too little by the end of the year. Typically you'll see a business unit with a couple of overworked worker bees and several VPs who go to a lot of meetings but don't do much except talk at each other in meetings and try to figure out how to work the politics.

HR is obsessed with the upper echelon of management, and could care less about the employees. They'll drive themselves crazy over how some memo looks to Executive A or all the SVPs and meanwhile they put very little forethought into a relocation strategy that affects thousands of employees and will bite them in the long run. For example, how many future genius fixed income portfolio managers will sign up to work in Merrimack, New Hampshire when they can go to the competitors in New York or London? And how many dollars is this firm saving by outsourcing HTML work to India when the work takes three times as long to be completed because every single piece of it must be explained, checked, and then checked and requested three more times until it is correct (and each round takes 2 weeks)?

The word on the street is with the up-and-coming leadership regime, it's all about the yes-men, and there's no heart there. Some of the old benefits have already disappeared, and most of the people in the know expect that when the Chairman retires, his successor wants to get rid of things like the long-loved employee shares. Believe me, this will happen.

This company loves layers, and insecure management lets incompetence reign in those layers -- especially directors and VPs -- because they can manipulate those employees or because they're too afraid to fire people who are in over their heads. Management and HR love to market to themselves internally.

Yet Fidelity will continue to make money in spite of this because it has reached a certain size in the marketplace. When I left, I took my money with me because after seeing how the sausage is made, this really isn't the best place to put your money. (Unless you are a high net-worth customer, they push you into the Freedom Funds, which are consistent underperformers.)

It's sad, because from what I understand from people who were there for a really long time, it used to be a really great company. This sentiment is heard around the firm, but I know a lot of people are afraid to leave because they're shackled to the benefits.

Life is short -- there are a lot of companies out there. If you're not overly committed to your kids' private schools or college tuitions, get the heck out while you still can. There is a world outside Fidelity.

Advice to Senior Management – I was at Fidelity for more than 8 years. I've seen enough to know that management there only listens to themselves, so it's pointless to give them advice.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Fidelity Investments full-time for more than a year

Pros – Large, well known company so good on your CV.

Cons – Lots of back stabbing, fake people, bad bonus, hardly any pay rise, very political, doesnt have a smooth working process and getting data is hard as there are so many sources. You have to know people to be able to get data!

Advice to Senior Management – Please look after your staff more instead of brown-nosing the whole time.

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

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

Pros – Ten years ago Fidelity was a great company to work for. Five years ago, before Lawson's reign of error chased out much of the core of long-term senior executives, Fidelity was a good company to work for.

Benefits are still good (though much reduced from earlier days). Compensation has been been flat for years, while the workload and responsibilities have increased as headcount has dropped.

Cons – Today Fidelity is a place you should look to only as a last resort. You will live in constant fear of having your job off-shored, eliminated, or moved halfway across the country. Some choice anecdotes from the last few years:
- Sold your house to follow your job to another state two years ago? Good for you, you can move again this year, right?
- Involuntary transfer from the East Coast to the Midwest last year? So sorry, you make too much money, here's a 20% pay cut; you can take the pay cut, or take a severance package at your *new* pay rate.
- Great news! We eliminated our on-shore development team to save money, so you'll need to work with the new offshore development team to complete your projects. PS - they're twelve hours ahead, and they aren't allowed to work remotely, so you'll have to work with them during their business hours (9 PM - 5 AM EST). Make sure you're in the office 8 AM to 6 PM though, wouldn't want to people to think you're slacking.
- Due to the economic climate, there will be no merit or cost-of-living increases this year, and bonuses and incentive programs are being cut for individual contributors. The good news is, we did manage to scrape up 300 million dollars for off-cycle bonuses for our top 270 executives.
- It's the first Tuesday of the month. The good new is, it will be way easier to find a parking spot tomorrow. The bad news is, you'll have no idea whether that key contributor on your project has been laid-off, or if they're on vacation for a week (unless you're the key contributor, of course).

Advice to Senior Management – Believe it or not (an we all know the answer), you don't need "Vice President" in your title to contribute meaningfully to the company.

You also don't need four new managers a year to keep from getting complacent.

You're netting ten digit profits (read: billions of dollars) after expenses despite your constant complaints about expense ratios. Yet it's nigh impossible to get a promotion, you won't fund the bonus pool at historic norms, the merit pool has been capped at or below inflation (if you get a raise at all), and the remaining employees are still covering for all of the staff you laid off over the past four years and/or your foolish attempts at a half-ass offshoring strategy(s). And you claim to not understand why your precious "employee engagement" scores keep going down.

Trend charts where the "discretionary investment" line goes up (look at all the work we accomplished!), the profit margin line goes up (look at how wonderful we're doing!) and the headcount line goes down (look how efficient we are!) are not motivating. Even if you try to be sneaky and put them on separate slides in your PowerPoint deck, we're smart enough to know that you got a huge bonus by way of making us spend more time in the office and away from our families. Work/life balance isn't supposed to mean, "You work 80 hour weeks so I can live it up on my new houseboat!"

Your senior and executive management is a stinking cesspool of cronyism and political back-stabbing. The vast majority of your typical vice president's time is spent either sharpening the proverbial knives to carve up each other's personal fiefdoms in the event of a misstep, or maneuvering to protect themselves from the ramifications of any potential misstep. As a result, a large percentage of the time spent by your line employees is expended in risk mitigation (i.e. ensuring the blame for any potential error or issue is assigned outside their organization), risk avoidance (i.e. tossing work over the wall to other groups whenever possible), and pre-emptive blamestorming (there must always be a scapegoat). Your "leaders" will actively sabotage projects and initiatives if they think it will provide a political advantage. This goes double whenever your business and IT teams are required to work together.

Either go back to the days where IT is integrated into the business lines, or completely separate and consolidate your IT functions. This hybrid structure where IT reports to senior business leaders but functions as a separate entity is a compromise that only manages to deliver the worst aspects of each solution. "Standardizing" on a single platform doesn't mean anything if every business unit that implements the platform does it in a different, and wholly incompatible, way.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend