State Street Reviews in Boston, MA Area

Pros

Work is easy and straight forward.

Cons

Management is incompetent and lazy

Advice to Senior Management

Levels of management need to be decreased.

Pros

Ability to take time off when needed and pretty good employee benefits. Generous 401k matching program but no 'pros' about the actual job.

Cons

Terrible place to work if you are looking to advance within the company. Good work/life balance, however, no recognition given to their best employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more appreciative to current employees instead of treating them like dirt.

Pros

Benefits, compensation, equipment, self-paced learning available on intranet

Cons

Culture, cooperation, attitudes of fellow workers. Upper management does not share well (information, training, feedback, recognition, etc.) with middle management and employees. Many employees appear burned out and unmotivated.

Advice to Senior Management

When one of the major forces to bring employees together is their collective fear of layoff or dismissal, you should be very concerned about the spirit and loyalty of your workforce. Also, Global Human Resources needs to come out from behind their firewall and be more "human" with employees in the form of face-to-face meetings and other personalized efforts.

Pros

They only pro I can think of for this job is that it get's your foot into the financial industry.

Cons

Lack of communication from management, reliant almost entirely on emails. Training seldom reflect actual group specific tasks so you walk in pretty much unprepared to the job. If you change groups which often happens, what you learned in one seldom reflects what you will do in the next. What you learn is almost all arbitrary since the tasks that you preform require little to no principals of the subject, as to say the job is almost robotic. And one more thing, why do you need to print out so much paper!

Advice to Senior Management

Promote the right people, I don't know why they ignore the people who know the most in the group and then promote someone laterally from another group that doesn't know what's going on. It's almost impossible to bark orders like they do. Also applies to promoting seniors, promote the people in your group, don't import someone else who doesn't have the capabilities and knowledge of others already in the group as their superior.

Pros

Great work / life balance

Cons

If you stay within the firm growth is slow most ppl leave and come back to advance

Advice to Senior Management

When making decisions on operations you should ask the ones actually doing the for input. Also recognizing high performers more and actually rewarding them on a timly manner for retention.

Pros

good place to work in finance industry.

Cons

none. most of the jobs are pushed to china. don't know this is good for the workers here.

Pros

Hours are very easy and the benefits are pretty good.

Cons

Oh god, where do I start?
First of all, they hire people who couldn't care less about their job, the industry, the client, even their own careers. As someone who is very interested in Financial markets, I found this job to be embarrassing. I would literaly prefer to say that I'm unemployed than to say I work in Fund Accounting.
The pay is terrible. It's far below other custodians. Bonuses are a joke (max 2500). For both years I was there, I had perfect reviews but extremely depressing bonuses. And as a top performer, I can honestly say that I was more likely to get laid off than to get promoted - that's how much upper management cares about their investor services division.
If back office work is bad, State Street probably has the worst out there. If you really don't give a **** about your career, then this would be the perfect place. Otherwise, do yourself a favor and only apply to SSGA or SSGM because those are the only 2 legitimate areas of State Street.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop accepting low quality as acceptable work. If you paid better, you would get better employees, who would produce better work, which would bring in more fees. It shouldn't be ok to be bad at your job. Stop treating ambitious employees with contempt. If you actually treated them well they might decide to stay instead of pushing your turnover rate higher.

Pros

Great benefits and flexible scheduling.

Cons

Poor IT systems and support, poor managerial strategy and implementation of new initiatives.

Pros

Work From Home arrangements
Career advancement opportunities
Promoting from within
Benefit package (excluding compensation) is above average

Cons

Email. Email. Email. Everyone receives over 200 a day and it never stops. Pick up the phone already.

In today's economy it's a CYA environment. This starts from the Sr Mgt; let's worry less about placing blame and institute appropriate controls instead.

Although the notion of cost cutting is impressive, cutting costs by offshoring activities is going to come back to haunt State Street. The level of service provided by State Street's JV is sub par at best.

Advice to Senior Management

Do we really think these offshoring initiatives are going to work? Are you serious?

Pros

Being in a good group is the key to your happiness at State Street. There are going to be groups where the bosses suck and there are going to be groups where the bosses are awesome. I've been lucky to work in a group where the bosses are awesome, they care about the employees and there is room for growth (if you're good). I've been working here for a little less than 5 years and I started not knowing a thing about the financial world. I gained a lot of experience and about 1.5 years later I was promoted to Associate II. About 2.5 years after that I was promoted to Senior Associate. Some of it was luck (I got the position after an employee left), but I was choosen over more senior people for the position.

If you are smart and have good bosses you can do well here.

Cons

Corporate bureaucracy - It's hard for big decisions to be made efficiently.
Internal Support Groups - They are sometimes slow to get back to you on issues.