Fidelity Investments reviews

Incompetent management who are only around to spy on employees every waking moment of the day. They drill you with metrics and are quick to point out the negative aspects of your performance while glossing over any positive aspects. For example, you could be leading your team in trade accuracy yet they will berate you for the fact you take a few extra seconds in between calls to wrap things up. Your metrics suffer if you have to use the restroom when you aren't on a break (often times you go a 3 or 3.5-hour stretch without one). Your schedule is outside of your control and offers no room for any leeway (I would always have break and lunch at different times every single day of the week). If you work on a schedule where you have to work on weekends there is almost zero chance of you ever getting a Saturday or Sunday off. Many of your coworkers and managers are rude, narcissistic egoists who will do anything to get ahead. There is almost no room for upward mobility if you start in the call center - something made very clear early on. It's just an endless line of phone jobs, finding a spot where you aren't working on the phone is exceedingly rare. Despite the fact that it does pay well, reps are still underpaid for the amount of work they must do. Full traders are almost always sitting in a position where there are 20+ calls holding all day for the entire 10 hour shift. Soul-crushing monotony with zero work/life balance, this job will inevitably make you wish you would get in a fatal car accident on the way in to work.

Comparatively low salary, unless you come in at a certain level. I was at Fidelity for several years -- in the beginning I was excited to be there, and I got great reviews and I moved up, and I did meet some really good people, so I thought there was a future there for me. But after seeing behind the curtain and realizing every part of the business was messed up, I jumped ship when the opportunity presented itself. In every business unit I was in, I saw a shocking lack of leadership. Projects are started and stopped in a haphazard, wasteful way based on whichever direction the political wind is blowing. Projects take years to complete when they shouldn't, and sometimes things launch and then they are immediately discarded. Or subpar work -- the standards, when you are talking about technology or communications or design, are way too low for a company of this size and reputation -- is allowed to launch and is weirdly celebrated. The website is terrible, and the technology at Fidelity is frighteningly behind, yet they spend billions on it every year. Many VPs (and there are oh-so-many) are afraid to say what they think, so naturally everyone underneath them is. People who move slowly and don't make waves are rewarded. People who suggest new ways to approach things are often viewed as threatening by people who have been sitting comfortably in their roosts for too long. Very little actual work gets done and I think Fidelity customers would be shocked to see how much money is wasted by this company on people who are paid way too much for producing way too little by the end of the year. Typically you'll see a business unit with a couple of overworked worker bees and several VPs who go to a lot of meetings but don't do much except talk at each other in meetings and try to figure out how to work the politics. HR is obsessed with the upper echelon of management, and could care less about the employees. They'll drive themselves crazy over how some memo looks to Executive A or all the SVPs and meanwhile they put very little forethought into a relocation strategy that affects thousands of employees and will bite them in the long run. For example, how many future genius fixed income portfolio managers will sign up to work in Merrimack, New Hampshire when they can go to the competitors in New York or London? And how many dollars is this firm saving by outsourcing HTML work to India when the work takes three times as long to be completed because every single piece of it must be explained, checked, and then checked and requested three more times until it is correct (and each round takes 2 weeks)? The word on the street is with the up-and-coming leadership regime, it's all about the yes-men, and there's no heart there. Some of the old benefits have already disappeared, and most of the people in the know expect that when the Chairman retires, his successor wants to get rid of things like the long-loved employee shares. Believe me, this will happen. This company loves layers, and insecure management lets incompetence reign in those layers -- especially directors and VPs -- because they can manipulate those employees or because they're too afraid to fire people who are in over their heads. Management and HR love to market to themselves internally. Yet Fidelity will continue to make money in spite of this because it has reached a certain size in the marketplace. When I left, I took my money with me because after seeing how the sausage is made, this really isn't the best place to put your money. (Unless you are a high net-worth customer, they push you into the Freedom Funds, which are consistent underperformers.) It's sad, because from what I understand from people who were there for a really long time, it used to be a really great company. This sentiment is heard around the firm, but I know a lot of people are afraid to leave because they're shackled to the benefits. Life is short -- there are a lot of companies out there. If you're not overly committed to your kids' private schools or college tuitions, get the heck out while you still can. There is a world outside Fidelity.