This job is great for desperate college grads who can’t find a job elsewhere in the business world. They’ll underpay you compared to the rest of industry by thousands and tell you their retirement plan is what makes up for it. Well, that 15% retirement plan isn’t really helping my, or anyone else’s, student debt. They started me out unbelievably low, got promoted after years of indentured servitude-like work, and ultimately gave me a peanuts raise. If you try to speak to your leaders about it, they’ll just tell you no go to timeout. If you want to make anything extra that is impactful, you have to work an extra 10 hours per week, in effect cancelling out their so called “well known work life balance” attribute. Office presence was mandatory while I was there. 5 days a week in the office, working 9-5. Imagine being as free as a college student, working where they decide they want to work and then coming to essentially an 8 hour prison cell. 8 hours was the minimum hours required at the office each day. Staring at those bleak, soul sucking florescent lights and watching the clock spin towards infinity reminded me of being stuck in a time loop. Every day is the same; you do the exact same things every day in the office that it is basically an assembly line. Things needed to be done at a certain time, otherwise you’re not getting a raise or a bonus. Everything that was done in the office could’ve been done at home but the culture is stuck in the 1980s. It was such a soul sucking experience that I would spend hours in the bathroom each day because I had nothing to do. Sometimes I would sleep in the stalls; other times I would cry.
Let’s talk performance measures: spoilers – they’re abstract. Since it’s a back office assembly machine, you don’t really have measurable goals to work towards. You don’t sell products, make products, or really even manage products. All you do is report out on the results of those products, so it’s really not cut and dry whether you’re performing because there’s only one metric – did you do it correctly? If yes, then they have to find other minute details to call you out on. They do not foster a healthy environment around making mistakes. If you make a mistake, no matter how small, you will hear about it in your manager 1 on 1 meetings. More often than not, you will sit there and just hear from your manager about mistakes that you weren’t even aware of because lead analysts are too afraid or unprofessional to talk to you about it in a timely manner. Instead of talking to professionals about it, they’re quick to write you up and place the offenses in their HR systems. Your feedback is never given to you timely, however, you will hear about it a month later and you probably won’t even recall it.
Having worked for a new employer for a number of years, I’ve come across multiple managers and senior managers who’ve said: if a person did X that was perceived to be a “mistake”, what was the impact of that “mistake”? Did the firm lose money? Was the client made unhappy? Did the product lose significant value? If it had no impact, then it’s not really a situation where it needs to be documented so formally. Instead, pull said person aside and have a quick and simple conversation about it. You know – like normal adults do. But at Capital Group, they will make sure you never forget what you did, beating you over your head with it, ad nauseam. You will hear about it formally in your 1 on 1s with your manager and they will document everything to which you will then hear about it yet again at yearend; it’ll basically haunt you for the rest of your career at Capital Group. The fund accounting department was, and every single person in it, extremely petty with anything you did because they simply had to be. People had to get rated and be bucketed into specific categories for yearend raises. So, in order to bucket people into lower categories, they have to find cellular insignificant things that you did to justify not giving you rewards. While understandable, the method on how they achieve this leaves employees feeling like hostages.
Diversity: Spoilers – there is none at the Norfolk, VA office. All of the senior managers are, for some weird reason, tall white middle-aged Caucasian males. And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with tall middle-aged Caucasian males but when 5 out of 5 of them are all the same, it’s really disheartening for anyone else who isn’t that to see. Yikes.
Upward mobility: Spoilers – it’s extremely slow and you basically have to wait for those people to leave those jobs. If they don’t, there’s no room for you to get promoted to say, manager or senior manager. This is pretty typical, however, of back office environments.
Skillset development: none of the hard skills you learn will be transferrable other than Excel or Powerpoint. It’s all specific to mutual funds and mutual fund accounting systems which is limited to the frontend.
I’ll leave this review by saying this – have you watched the Apply TV show, Severance? When I worked at Capital Group, I wish that I could forget where I worked each day when I left work. I wish I could delete that entire experience from my mind.
