Extremely conservative culture (not political, just uptight)
Strict dress code unless you give to charity
They outsource the coding to India and, with the exception of some frontend customer-facing development, are not highly interested in the quality of work. Throw more hardware at it if it doesn't perform well.
If you are at a lower level you can expect to participate in development to an extent but once you move up your job becomes more like a project manager's and you are mainly keeping tabs on contractors from India and their offshore counterparts
Meetings, meetings, meetings. For some reason, you cannot get anything done at USAA without setting up a meeting. Everybody from senior level on upward has at least 60% of their day blocked off for meetings. Managers usually have days solidly blocked off. Email often goes unresponded.
Outdated technical stack. Don't work here if you like working with cutting edge stuff. Only exceptions are mobile app development and web scripting (HTML5/CSS3).
Nobody does n-tier development here, it is all segmented out at each layer, i.e. the web devs are agnostic of how anything works on the backend and vice-versa. They picked Wicket in favor of many better, industry-standard options just to keep this practice in place. In general they discard industry standards in favor of some bizarre homegrown solution (read: your experience does not transfer out of here).
Extremely tangled dependency web. In some attempt to eliminate duplication of effort they have intermingled scores of web services together such that a minor change to one requires checking a mountain of dependencies and the testing that goes with it. It's not uncommon for what should be a simple web service to call 5 others and take a really long time to complete.
