Pros
Good teamwork, especially across teams. Generally, the devs here are good at what they do and good communicators, with a some great personalities, in and out of work. The work can be really interesting, and sometimes really fun and challenging. Working at scale is especially interesting; it's very satisfying to solve a problem with complex moving parts, often with proper collaboration. The QA process is good, with a hardworking and dedicated team.
Cons
A lot of the work is actually quite dry, with much of it just shuffling data from the back to the front end. Lots of devs seem to be bored or frustrated; there's a lot of CRUD and mapping, it's not particularly creative. The work itself comes in fits and starts. You can be crazy busy, then have no work at all. The strategy and pipeline is not optimised for polish, rather just to get features out the door. There aren't really any structures in place to improve things, the anecdotal narrative is that it may get attended to one-day, some-day, but that day never really comes. Although they say they're "agile" it's actually just waterfall done in sprints. As someone else mentioned, the process is very siloed; it seems to be more of a blinkered, checkbox exercise in churning out features, rather than looking at the outcome holistically, or from the customer perspective. Management don't seem to want to listen to ideas. Sure they do retros, but nothing got acted upon in the time I was there, and there's no real structure or support process to raise issues and have them tackled. You will have the same old problems for months and months, so you have to develop your own workarounds, but don't expect it to go any further. It was a real challenge to get any software purchased and took 3 - 4 months in some cases (if at all). I was never sure if this related to the scale of things, the fact that banking is regulated, or just communication and lack of understanding of what we were trying to achieve at the coal face.
