Charles Schwab reviews

Shockingly non-existent onboarding or documentation. Every thing you attempt to do present some new challenge you can't overcome without esoteric knowledge that only one person that's now in another department knows. And no domain knowledge either, so you'll have no idea what the work you're accomplishing actually does or is meant to do. Some of these knowledge transfer meetings were also grueling, 3+ hour endeavors, where the employees who were teaching you their platforms would just work silently as the trainees watched. Recovering from some really bad practices, such "include precompiled binaries of the libraries we use" instead of "reference our internal package server." Which made my job of porting our code an absolute nightmare. Cryptic and unflexible. When I was hired they did not tell me the location of the office (or any details at all, I had to reach out to find out when my first day was,) and I assumed it was at their campus. It was a branch building, where my commute was over 2 hours long each way (instead of the 7 minutes to their campus.) I asked and they explained that work from home was only available for medical reasons. The first pay period I was dinged for having an inconsistent schedule, due to the effect of traffic on our bus routes. The second pay period I was dinged for staying in the office too long, due our commuter bus schedule running 15 minutes later than the end of the day. I was told I could take flex time and leave earlier on Friday to prevent from accruing overtime. The third pay period I was dinged for not working enough hours on Friday, and was told they wouldn't pay me for the hour I owed (which was fine, as I was also dinged for working overtime on Monday through Friday, for which I was paid extra.) I gave up after that. For security reason the office internet is highly locked down, which make absolute sense. But there's also no guest network and no cell phone reception in their offices, which means you will slowly go insane at the lack of human communication. I spent over 3 hours in a meeting where the culture committee derived the rules to Pictionary, for a game that lasted us 20 minutes. This was not an ironic exercise.

With all companies, Schwab has it's cons. Rather or not you can live with it is up to the individual but I don't see how anyone can work here for the long term. I think the management team knows and expects that. The biggest issue here is compensation for FCs (or in branch advisors). They want you to work like a ML or independent advisor going out and get business. However, they don't pay you like one. The worse is that they are subsidizing the savings for investors on the back of advisors. So we see record earning and profit emails from corporate every quarter, but are told that our compensation is being reduced year over year. The corporate bonus pool is funded at 120%, but we don't get that. So investors get discounts in fees, executives/managers gets their bonuses, FCs gets a cut in income. Ouch. Second, not all FCs are the same. Meaning that if you been with Schwab for over 10 years and had your pick of your BOB, you are likely have a solid income ($150k+). So I think Schwab management is trying to address this "issue" by tweeking FC comp. However, it also hits new FCs so I don't see how or why I would want to stick it out. Lastly, their bonus structure is a joke. We all know that the name of the game is for assets and put them into management. Charge backs are a part of that process. But Schwab took it to a new perverse level. They require that all clients stay in the solution for 2 years or the entire bonus is paid back to Schwab, no proration. So if someone stayed in a solution for 23 months, Schwab collected fees for 23 months, but you have pay back you ENTIRE bonus. What's worse is that it also counts gains. So in a year like 2017 where clients made 20% in the market and they decides to cash out that 20% and spent it, that 20% will count against your earnings. Why would that make sense?