Absolute Nightmare - Job Ruined My Life - Anonymous employee Citi Employee Review

1.0
May 9, 2013
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

None. If you only care about the paycheck, it might be acceptable. But there are no other upsides, particularly if you actually want to care about or find fulfillment in what you do.

Cons

This will likely sound like the rantings of a disgruntled employee, but as a human being, I beg you: do not come to work at Citi. The company perfectly fits the stereotype of a massive decentralized organization characterized by stifling bureaucracy. Employees are almost universally unhappy, save for the paycheck, and there is no management or human resources support when problems arise. Operations at the company work through endless recurring conference calls filled with buzzwords like "leverage," "use cases," and "workstream," but no results are ever achieved and no tasks are actually completed. Because of the size and global spread of the company and the fact that most employees work from home, managers essentially answer to no one, and it's genuinely possible for employees to completely disappear within the system. Human resources are inaccessible -- if they exist at all -- and getting help with something as simple as a desk to work at and a computer that actually works are left completely up to the individual employee to figure out. There is no ability to advance to a higher role or even a different group: once you're planted in a slot, that's where you're expected to be, for years on end if necessary. From my experience, no matter what interviewers and hiring coordinators say, job descriptions given to potential employees have no actual relationship to what employees are actually expected to do - in large part because managers operate without any sense of strategic direction, and bodies are just thrown at meaningless projects without any sense of reasoning or applicable skills. Regardless of the nature of the work, everything is done in Excel spreadsheets containing meaningless data, and there is no sense of employee loyalty to the company or to one's co-workers. Employees refuse to respond to emails or phone messages, and even when meetings are scheduled, individuals completely ignore them, because there is no management penalty or monitoring. Projects are initiated with no sense of timeline or goals - or even a sense of "why are we doing this?" - and frequently discussing the status of projects on conference calls is viewed as a more acceptable substitute than actually getting something done. Individuals frequently ignore deadlines and refuse to collaborate on group projects, because every individual work unit only answers to itself, and upper management has no recourse over individual groups to force results. Meanwhile, even items requiring first-level managers to take the simplest action go completely ignored for months on end - which is actually fine, because no one within the company cares about what others in the company do anyway. Regardless of the fact that this sounds like a rant, please, as a human being, I beg you to take this seriously: do not come to work at Citi. I have loved every job I ever took before I began working at Citi, and only agreed to come on board to relocate to another area for family reasons. I regret it every day, and regretted it from the very first week. Do not work at Citi. If you care at all about what you do, it will ruin you.

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Cons

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2.0
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Pros

Great benefits (PTO, healthcare, etc.) for FTEs

Cons

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