Pros
Quite a collegial atmosphere compared to other work places. They make a decent contribution to pension (10% of base salary). The London office is nice, albeit the floor space became increasingly smaller due to consolidation of departments. Support staff are decent and enable relatively smooth running of most IT and business processes.
Cons
HR department is dysfunctional (to put it mildly). I worked here for 6 years and in that 6 years the only interaction I had with HR was when I was initially interviewed and then when doing my exit interview. Literally no input from HR in terms of educational courses that employees could or should do. The appraisal system is a joke and only exists to justify the existence of HR. No one takes any notice of it and it does not effect year end compensation. A further issue is generally poor management. It took the new CEO only 2 months to realize that he had to fire 10,000 people. What was his predecessor doing for the previous 5 years? Even with the new 4.0 strategy (by the way, wtf is 4.0 supposed to mean??!) the implementation is taking forever. In general you find that middle and senior management are all German, male, middle aged and white. There is a HUGE problem with group-think in this bank. Have a look at the code of conduct and you'll see what I mean. Another drawback is the workers council in Frankfurt. This bank is run by the workers council. What this means in practice is that every time people have to be fired, they look at non German locations (and non German staff) first. That means if you work in London you run a higher risk of being fired. The corollary of this is that there is a huge amount of deadwood in Frankfurt and other locations. Basically, because it's nigh on impossible to fire staff in Germany it has created a culture of asymmetric behaviour by German staff. They do little or nothing because i) they won't get paid if they do something and ii) they won't get fired if they do nothing. Bottom line, the workers council has created a civil service mentality. Compensation. Year end compensation (bonus) is based on discretion by managers and not upon measurable performance targets. So you could have had a great year in PnL terms, and you can still get shafted.