Pros
Good compensation in IT departments, good benefits. They pay well but for the ugly job and duties they make you responsible for. See the details in Cons.
Cons
Not a place for IT employees to grow professionally. The company outsources projects to external vendors with novice developers for cheap rates. At the same time it shifts own crews to do support and cleanup of the mess done by the outsourcing companies. A lot of time is wasted on bureaucratic procedures and meeting about other meetings. Very conservative environment in IT - the bank does not adopt or adopts very slowly new methodologies and technologies. Recent acquisitions resulted in the IT infrastructure being a mix of all kinds platforms and applications, some of them very old or in-house grown. The bank wastes a lot of time and money on IT support because of very flawed and improperly done system integrations that followed acquisitions. Lack of enforcing good programming practices and enterprise architecture standards in IT. Inclination to ad-hoc, cheap and poor quality technical solutions in applications development. The exempt employees work a lot of (unpaid) overtime - the environment is far from the decent work-life balance.
