Morningstar Reviews

Pros

Great team members - we spend most of our waking hours at work (!) and it's so important to work with individuals who are passionate and friendly Speaking for my own experience, managers support career progression and actively coach to develop competencies in existing roles Morningstar is all about empowering investor success. Everything we do is investors first and is not the "evil finance company" (for lack of a better word)

Cons

Teams restructure every couple years or so which can be challenging, but it comes from a place of trying to become more efficient

Pros

Open culture in the organization

Cons

Can't think of anything yet

Pros

A great culture with support for long-term growth. MDP is one of their best programs for young professionals. Working at Morningstar was intellectually rewarding. People are kind. Culture is great!

Cons

HR needs help. Pay is not as competitive as the industry.

Pros

Great teammates who genuinely cared about each other and getting the job done to the best of their ability.

Cons

Fear based leadership with poor communication and covert bullying. People were afraid to speak up and when they did their ideas were shot down if they didn't conform to exactly how the leaders wanted things to get done. Command and control micromanagement with no permission to make any independent decisions. One of the individuals responsible for the department demonstrated emotional instability by having a meltdown in a meeting when someone shared some bad news. They would also tell you how disappointing you are if you didn't meet their expectations even though those expectations had never been adequately conveyed. No one is responsible for others' feelings and using words like disappointed is completely inappropriate in business and disempowering to your workforce. The leaders of this group gossiped, had favorites and would badmouth people on the floor. Everyone was just a pawn and there didn't seem to be any interest in developing the talent so they could advance in their career.

Pros

Great work life balance, good benefits

Cons

Rotation takes longer than they tell, over hired position

Pros

The biggest secret about Morningstar is that it is a fantastic place for creatives. I know, I know, we are a investment focused company but the opportunities for creatives is wild. Not to mention that there are a bunch of musicians, writers, filmmakers, and artists working here. Also, a lot of companies talk about work/life balance but Morningstar actively encourages it. Every manager I know here encourages people taking care of themselves and their loved ones. Most importantly, the CEO and all the managers model it. Also, I think it is a really exciting time for Morningstar. The potential of a lot of opportunities that have long been discussed are coming into fruition. Finally, there are tons of kind and cool people working here. I'm not much of an elevator talker, but sometimes I can't help but get pulled into it because people are nice around here.

Cons

Honestly, I don't think the "cons" are unique to Morningstar. They are table stakes for working any corporate job. What's a con of working for a large company? That's probably the case here. The "pros" far outweigh the "cons."

Pros

Generally well intended colleagues Fairly safe place to be during industry-wide cost reductions Vacation/PTO/Sabbatical

Cons

Health Insurance benefits have really been downgraded in the last couple of years Most people have spent much of their career here with no real insights outside of Morningstar; this leads to inflated viewpoints of our own products If you don't pray to the ESG gods, this probably isn't a great place to be

Pros

I was hired as a Project Manager but was doing a Product Manager job. That actually was good for me as I wanted to get into Product Management. Nice office space downtown.

Cons

Management is TERRIBLE. I was part of the Direct team and being an Asian American with a white manager I had a horrible time. The manager seemed to have some bipolar issues. I actually came to Morningstar after taking a 9% paycut so I could work on some good stuff. Manager was okay to work with in the beginning but you could see that he did not have any engineering skills and did not want anyone to overshadow him. His way of dealing with this is to badmouth you. I asked for my title to be changed from Project to Product and they would not do it. But I saw a young white guy being given the title with the claim that "he helped us onboard new clients". My manager hatched a plot to get rid of me and give my job to a friend of his who was in a peer team which was getting disbanded. So he started keeping information from me. He would not take me to client meetings because I am not white. Instead he would take another white team member in my place. I would not have all the information to do my job and then he would blame me. There is NO way out of this in the company, you are stuck. Shenzhen people are given too much power and the project managers there do whatever they want and do not inform us in Chicago. One such time a manager deferred my project without informing me and my manager jumped on a chance to defame me. He put me on a PIP with a lot of fake accusations. All his claims were along the lines of "everybody says bad things about you" with no specifics. If you work at Morningstar, you are a slave and have no way to defend yourself. I got fedup of this racism and decided to leave. I resigned right before our first review meeting and this clueless manager of mine acted shocked about why I was leaving. I later found out that he had made some promises to customers and was not able to follow through and Morningstar had lost customers. He was in the hot seat so he decided to shift blame by making me the fall guy. One of the Sales VPs told me this. Too late, Damage was done. He also cheated me of my annual raise. I don't recommend working there if you are non-white. There are no processes to deal with rogue managers with mental issues. Pays is terribly low and they hired someone to do a research pay across companies and conveniently claimed that Morningstar was on par with market. What a lie, everyone laughed at management behind their backs. Now all the good people have left and the lazy ones are left behind.

Pros

Learned alot Some interesting work

Cons

Pay is low Lots of turnover

Pros

Lower salary than average for that industry

Cons

Always reorganizing, headless direction, no real strategy for future