Had an offer from Citigroup a few months ago, hope this is useful for anyone approached, this is from my interview/offer experience and from talking to folks at Citi privately:<p>- They claimed remote was impossible, after I told them it was a red line there was suddenly an exception. They did claim this exception required a lot of approvals but take from that what you will.<p>- The projects they wanted me to work on were genuinely ambitious and impactful, not just something thankless.<p>- They claimed to want to start open sourcing large parts of their tech from 2023 onwards.<p>- It's definitely a different world from the rest of tech, people seemed to care about the things they worked on, but the way things were reasoned about just seemed a bit different.<p>- The people I met there are genuinely nice people (at least in Tech) who I'd be happy to sit down and have a coffee with anytime.<p>- Even the very specifically designated tech places had debt coming in from the rest of the company (primarily in process when they had to touch other teams), they did say they had C-Suite buy-in to go solve that but as I didn't join I can't comment on how strong that buy in really is.<p>- Politics is everywhere, people will fight you not on technical merit but because they want to claim responsibility for something even if its inferior to the product you could build - if you don't have the support to push through this I suspect you'd get stuck here.<p>- Corporate structure is confusing because everyone's titles are massively inflated.<p>- Claimed to have internal open source in the Division I interviewed for (didn't expect that).<p>- Offer for 2 YoE UK was VP £190k/year with no stock
Banks are where tech careers go to die. Expect to be caught in a myriad of "initiatives" that are all fluff. Remember, if you're not making the bank money, you're costing them money.
Ah traditional banking, where tech teams are disposable, seasonal and underpaid. Good luck to anyone who trusts a traditional bank with their technical career.
Somewhat unrelated but Citi's software has been ... not very good from my perspective as a customer. The app is crashing/down frequently, as is the website.<p>Which seems pretty smelly to me from the outside.
This year has already seen plenty of layoffs and far more will come. Some companies even rescinded job offerings. The economic situation isn't suited for hiring, especially not so many people.<p>But, even worse, it's <i>a bank.</i>