Pros
• You can achieve huge impact. With enough effort you really can kickstart your career here. There’s a lot of room for improvement, so if you really care, and you are willing to sacrifice some free time, you can make processes significantly better and achieve huge impact and visibility. • Takes you out of comfort zone. The environment, the office and the work culture take people out of their comfort zones. Especially introverted people can learn a lot from this. It can be a life changing experience, and a boost to the employee's self-esteem. • Lots of non-monetary benefits. Very regular and pretty great team outings, flexible time off, work from home highly supported, great company mobile, regular company events at great places with free food and drinks. These benefits were better than at any of the workplaces in Budapest I know of. • The people are nice. The colleagues create a super friendly environment - at least they definitely do in the Budapest office. I think of my colleagues here as close friends. • High level of freedom. You won't be micro-managed. You are often allowed to do just whatever feels the most meaningful / useful to you.
Cons
• Screwed up incentives. In general, people are not really given incentive to do their jobs well. Good performance is rarely rewarded, bad performance is rarely punished. As far as I know, the bonuses are more-or-less evenly distributed to be about 1 monthly salary, literally not even depending on your actual performance. I also think that incentives aren’t set well on a firm-wise level. The “anything that can be sold to the clients is already good enough” attitude is not driving people here to make good solutions, especially in markets artificially created by regulatory rules. • There are some demotivated people. If you engage a random employee in a 1on1 deep conversation, and show that it is okay to be actually honest, and you ask about how they feel about BlackRock, they often will end complaining for an extended period of time, and say that this is just a stepping stone for them, a good place to learn, but they don't think of staying here long term. In fact, how much people believe that BlackRock is a great place is strongly correlated to how much they have to sell that "BlackRock is a great place" to others. HR who has to sell the firm to possible hires, or client facing teams might be overly positive, but isolated teams like FMG might be overly negative about it. • Tech solutions aren’t too cutting edge. Most of the tech solutions here are rather deprecated. There are codebases in such shape, that most of the people agree that only a complete rewrite could save them. You sometimes better off reimplementing something than using the previous work of another BlackRock employee. • Teams are organized in an ineffective way. The HR of BlackRock really believes that diversity makes better teams. The employees of BlackRock actually like to make fun of how much it does not work, and how most of the people dislike working in such teams. But diversity here also implies that teams are usually spread across multiple locations - often with huge time zone difference, making even more difficulties in teamwork. • Planning for the future is undervalued. The management only have supper vague plans for the future, that are not detailed enough for practical use. Even for current projects, there are often no specifications or detailed plans. • High turnover. Most of the BlackRock employees leave after a few years. For software developers, the "senior developer" layer is almost completely missing. There are managers who have been here for more than 10 years, and there are juniors who joined in the past 3 years, but there's not much people in between. • The talent pool is not that exceptional. While this is strongly subjective, I personally felt more satisfied with the talent pool at my last workplace, even though it payed less money than BlackRock.