Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Reviews

Pros

Work life balance, job security

Cons

Repetitive, similar types of people

Pros

The pay is pretty decent, the benefits are really good with a great 401k, pension after 5 years, great health insurance, paid time off is decent as well.

Cons

This is a very high-paced high stress work enviornment. Working in the cash department means dealing with a lot of strict procedures, and controls due to security reasons, It's very easy to make the slightest mistake and if you do you will get written up for it.

Pros

If superficiality is your thing, please see the 5 stars above.

Cons

If substance is what you value, here are 5 reasons for each of the 5 stars. 1. Meetings > Work: We all know that the more meetings we have, the more important we are. The meetings and meetings and meetings about meetings! FRB Boston is just the utopia of meetings. It's not just the number but also the participant count in each of the meetings that make this place the best place for meetings. And, the real jewel of the crown is the participant count. Imagine whole day meetings with more than 200 people. Oh, I should say "frequent" whole day meetings with 200 people. Just looking at my calendar full of meetings makes me feel so productive. Is there anything better? If your answer is "yes", then you are right and this place is for you. Overlapping meetings! There is an official "No meetings on Friday" rule. But, rules are meant to be broken. And the top brass makes it happen. 2. Excuses > Execution: This is the perfect place, one that never runs out of excuses. "I don't know" is the most common of them all. But, to the list are "It's out of my hands", "I've never done this before", "This is how it's always done here", etc. Then, there are the completely of the world ones. In one my meeting (yes, meetings are unavoidable), I asked the senior most executive of the project to create a Microsoft Teams channel for kudos. You know, one we can use to praise someone else for a job well done. His response was, "We can't do that here". Sadly, there was no Kudos channel else to give kudos to this executive for that excuse. The excuses seem to get better as the seniority increases. Ask a brand new engineer, "I need help finding this information?" and the response could be "Let me get that for you." Ask the top brass "I need help fixing this problem" and the response could be "My hands are tied." 3. Chaos > Order: Imagine developing an absolutely amazing software application, one that has the best of breed technologies and does incredible amount of public good. This is what the FedNow project aims to achieve. Well, at least on paper. Everyone and their grandmother these days uses cloud solutions. And for good reason. Hence, the decision here to use cloud services. Excellent. However, this place goes a few steps further. Microservices? No no no. Monolithic? Yes yes yes. So, spin up EC2 instances and deploy applications there. There's more. Don't use AWS provided solutions. Instead spin up more EC2 instances and deploy databases there. There's even more. Don't use AWS App Mesh. Spin up even more EC2 instances and deploy service mesh servers there. There's more. So much more. One fine day, there is a brand new member in the team. Everyone in the management team knew but no on the team was made aware. One fine day, someone in the team leaves all of a sudden. Everyone in the management team knew but no one in the team was made aware. If the people down in the trenches were made aware of these upcoming changes right away, there will be too much order and not enough chaos. Hence all the secrecy. It's a no brainer. Quite literally. 4. Missed deadlines > Met deadlines: This wonderful project called FedNow started. With great hopes and great expectations. Then, things began to go awry. Unsure why. There are so many meetings and meetings. And a plethora of excuses to go along with the meetings. And the widespread chaos. In spite of all these, things started slipping. It was incomprehensible. Having all those meetings alone should have been enough. It's like buying all those weight loss books and watching all those weight loss youtube exercises and still not losing weight. Who cares about diet and exercise. Just buying those books and watching those videos should be good enough. So incomprehensible. Who would have thunk. So, they did the absolute right thing. They did what everyone expected them to do. Had more meetings. For longer durations. With more people. And hey, guess what the end result turned out to be. 5. Leadership redefined: Step 1 - Hire an absolutely competent leader. Step 2 - Leader decides to have all the QA tests using X technology. Step 3 - Things go haywire initially. But, the engineers start to make it happen. Step 4 - Fire the absolutely competent leader. Step 5 - Go back to step 1. Step 6 - Achieve results. This concludes Part I. If you want to know about subsequent parts, you have to experience them first hand. In which case, please join FRB Boston.

Pros

Great benefits and plenty of career options

Cons

The pay for tech is below market

Pros

Work Life Balance is very good if you set boundaries and don’t let them take advantage of you Healthcare benefits are pretty good FedNow uses ok tech 401k match is pretty high

Cons

Pay kinda sucks and they refuse to adjust our pay for the outrageous inflation the FRS is partially to blame for. PTO benefits are below average. 3 weeks is bad in 2022. Sick time is policed heavily by HR. It should just be one bucket of PTO. We earned it, let us use it how we want to. Extra COVID leave is not available to single employees without children. FedNow Leads are expected to contribute more than most people and makes it so that they are stretched thin and can’t effectively lead. Management doesn’t appreciate people until they threaten to leave HR thinks the pension is a good benefit despite a 5 year vesting period for such a low amount and uses it to lowball you. There’s barely any diversity in leadership. Heavy majority of leaders are straight white people. Hiring in FedNow is very top heavy when it comes to experience Uses SAFe as their agile methodology Management likes to promise answers to questions then never follows up

Pros

Good benefits, tuition reimbursement, learning culture

Cons

Bureaucratic structure, slower pace of work

Pros

It's not that difficult and you consistently work 40 hours a week with flexible timing.

Cons

Most of the work is actually quite boring

Pros

Amazing work and benefits with great culture

Cons

None as specific since mostly WFH

Pros

A great place to worked. I loved my job.

Cons

Nothing as it was a great place to work.

Pros

Great benefits (pension, 401K, medical)

Cons

I can't think of any.