I had a very bad experience working with BlackRock Inc.. I was a high-ranking student with 3.9 GPA from a premier Technology university in upstate New York with over 4 years of prior full-time software development experience in IT industry. I have several project star awards to my credit prior to working with this company. At BlackRock, I was hired as an Analyst with an inaccurate software engineer job description out of my university by my manager in Green Package Automation team - Portfolio Analytics Group only to realize that they could not find young graduates to fill in their requisitions and people who had left, and hence they did not disclose the truth! Yes, believe me they do manipulate job description and wages when hiring you.
I was based out of Wilmington, Delaware and the work culture is a bad shape! Cheap, unqualified professionals, low wages, intensely bureaucratic software release process, work times being tracked, your computer screen is being stalked, your conversations are being stalked, etc. Little or no good mentors available since even they are fighting/competing with the company culture by leaking your performance and minor mistakes to your manager to gain credit for being watchful seniors.
If you are a Software Engineer or Technology-related professional this company will not be a good move! The management has only bad apples left since the good ones have left. Managers have been promoted not by virtue of technology knowledge or innovation but since they stayed back when others left leaving no competition for them. You are assigned work on Angular, Angular UI, Node.js, jQuery, JavaScript but my manager did not have first-hand experience/competence on the same. Till date they keep writing and maintain Perl scripts and have recently started building web applications internally. Totally unstructured process of developing process, literally no unit-test cases written, or full-time tester testing your developed software but aiming for 'whatever you've done will work when released'! They do not understand or implement Agile software development methodology and use JIRA as a substitute assuming that by itself is Agile methodology. Absence of a process means believing in incorrect estimations of work and blaming that on your team members in year-end review.
To correct the decade-old bad software left behind by employees who have left, rewriting and reinventing software is not possible since moving a brick will cause business to be disrupted and I've tried earnestly and my manager watched silently to blame me for my efforts. Problem-solving and design-thinking (the very core tenet of software engineering) is non-existent! Following such a practice for a year only makes you a bad engineer and develops an attitude of complacency and incompetence (with correct practices).
Applying Organizational Behavior, I could notice employees working too many extra hours (both on weekdays and on weekends). Male employees with grey hair at the age of 25 and several others going bald at an age of 28-30 due to over-working, fighting frustration and bad mental health. I had noticed employees having an accident/surgery and showing up to work (on sometimes crutches) next day. Workload management and Empathy was missing! I had to hide my happiness and minor accomplishments from my own team and manager.
Your year-end review will be frustrating and a big let down in your overall career because your will be evaluated against goals/job description you did not set! You only realize the bad experience in the job after being deep down in the bad shape and how bad an engineer you had become after you make a good move (i.e. find a good job) and become a good competitive engineer again, and earn a promotion with fair and spirited team culture and mentors.
Rest you go figure.
