Pros
- Good location - Free parking for employees - Some genuinely interesting people to work with - 100% match for your 401k contributions is nice. - The bonus plan, if they actually pay.
Cons
Ally Bank is a small bank, but it's part of a huge financial institution and managed by people who have all worked at much larger banks. So you get the assets and market share of a small bank with the management overhead and process of the largest banks in the world. Seriously, there are far too many chiefs and not enough indians here. Well, that's not entirely true if you work in IT. The whole organizational structure is geared toward CYA. Nobody will ever, ever make a decision on even the most trivial thing without a powerpoint deck, 3 meetings, and an admirable attempt to get somebody else to decide instead. If you have an idea about how to do something better or improve a process, just keep it to yourself. Your opinion is not welcome unless you worked at BofA for your manager 3 years ago. Like many old-school organizations, there's a big emphasis on empire-building. So you meet people who are hired because a manager needed to preserve his/her headcount but for whom there is no actual work. These people either contribute nothing to the success of the company or invent the process and bureaucracy necessary to keep their jobs. Then they get to hire their own staff and the cycle repeats.