Pros
• USAA hires nice people, so colleagues are pleasant. • Education benefits. • Diversity and inclusion. • Your psychic abilities will get a lot of use trying to extract business requirements from people who don't know what they want, and couldn't communicate it effectively if they did.
Cons
• Pay is WAY under market value. That's supposedly offset by bonuses and retirement benefits - which have recently seen cuts. My total compensation doesn't even come close to meeting the target that *USAA itself* displays for my role. • So many layers of bureaucracy. It's a middle-management extravaganza. A lot of people have been here forever, yet seem to do nothing but slow things down. • Don't be fooled by job descriptions; if you're lucky enough to use Agile, it will be the corrupted version that is SAFe. But in our area, even that is in name only. Welcome back to Waterfall y'all! Not even true Waterfall, but Waterfall trying to masquerade as Agile and failing miserably. Get ready for: arbitrary deadlines set by people with no understanding of the software development process; vague requirements that change by the day; siloed teams; planning that gets immediately ignored; doing the jobs of incompetent people "above" you; meetings; more meetings; still more meetings; and other fabulous prizes! • Good luck using industry-standard anything. Everything is locked-down in the name of "compliance," which, while sometimes valid, is often just a company-wide catch-all excuse to explain away poor/unpopular policies and decisions. "We can't come up with a good reason (because there isn't one). So...Compliance!" • Is there a tool you've been using for your entire career? You'd better hope it's on the approved list (it probably isn't), because getting something approved involves more hoops than a hula-hoop convention. • Non-technical management does not listen to (or value) the technical expertise of engineers presumably hired for that very expertise. • Engineers have to correct/rewrite assigned features, often creating their own acceptance criteria, which obviously makes no sense. • In addition to being a software engineer, you will also be expected to perform the role of dev-ops, security, and testing engineer - because for some reason there are not dedicated teams for these functions. Your pay will *not* reflect that you're doing the work that would - in most companies - be performed by four different people.