Technology needs a top down culture transformation - Technical Director Charles Schwab Employee Review

2.0
Sep 1, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There are some very talented individuals in the organization. There is access to an extensive amount of training material and online courses and funding opportunities for external courses.

Cons

Schwab needs a top down culture transformation in the technology organizations. The existing leadership is not capable of delivering that. They are 15-20 years or more behind industry peers maturity and capabilities and that is largely unacknowledged and unrecognized amongst leadership. There is a complete absence of engineering culture, product management, and leadership. There is a preference to reward firefighting and completely ignore fire prevention. Management culture also prefers to subjectively talk and PowerPoint problems to death instead of using data analysis to help drive faster decision making and movement toward resolution. Nothing Schwab is doing with technology is groundbreaking or innovative. The majority of the work is to address problems many other larger enterprises already solved 10-15 years ago. Schwab needs to learn how to listen to and use this experience and knowledge from the individual team members who bring much of this experience to the table. Much of the problems are people and process issues and not simple technology gaps.

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5.0
Jul 15, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great community, lots of fun events and work life balance

Cons

Is slow and feels like a retirement job

1.0
Jul 15, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-Paycheck comes on time most weeks -8% 401k match is very competitive

Cons

-Raises our very low. The “exceeding expectations” raise has been around 3% for the last three years, which is under inflation. -AI is used as the primary way of grading performance, however the way that this AI grades is kept secret from us doing the work. You can have great feedback from client but if the AI scores you low, you will be written up/fired. - Client data entry and account operations have been outsourced to low-quality processors India. Every single day you will deal with issues because of how much sloppy work is being done. There is no follow up or problem-solving regarding these errors, they are just a fact of life at Schwab, and you need to double check pretty much everything being done here. -Most members of leadership, when sharing their personal story, will share that Schwab was their second choice. They call someone who has left Schwab and then come back a “schwabarang” and many members of leadership are Schwabarangs. This can easily be felt in the nature and character of the leadership where the focus is on KPI numbers and keeping costs as low as possible over any kind of improvement of operational effectiveness

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