Pros
I would describe my salary as being fair. You could expect annual raises to basically just keep up with (or barely exceed) inflation (2-3%). In today’s age, that’s actually not that bad, so to me, it’s a “pro.” Benefits (much better): -Company paid about 90% of premiums for healthcare, vision and dental. -Company paid a 50% 401(k) match on first 8% of compensation (with immediate vesting). -Other standard benefits are available (life ins, FSAs, tuition reimbursement, etc.) -PTO is generous: 15 PTO days; 21 PTO days after 3 years. 10 paid holidays. -Hours were very flexible, at least for my department. You could arrive between 7-9 am. My job was rewarding enough to keep me there for a number of years. Large office allowed for lateral movements if one desired. Culture in compliance department was average to slightly-above-average. Large department (and company) meant you could socialize with the people you liked and avoid the people you didn’t like. Some people might not have been good at their jobs, but there were no toxic, bad apples present when I was there. Department had around 30 or so people with a wide diversity in age, sex and ethnicity.
Cons
As mentioned by several others, it's easy to move around, but not easy to move up. You are not incented to work hard because your efforts will not be financially recognized. Everyone gets a standard base raise of 2-3%, regardless of your effort or quantity/quality of work completed. Department uses a database that tracks various work completed, but I believe those resulting statistics had no correlation to your yearly raise computation. I always wished raises were more stratified (0.5% - 4.5%) to reward the better performers and punish the lazy ones. You might be able to earn a slightly higher raise by volunteering for projects that require at least a month or more commitment. I suppose there's always going to be dead weight in any organization, but as one of my fellow analysts in Denver noted, "Great West doesn't seem to get rid of dead weight so the lazy employees never have to change." That was exactly my experience as well. I was surprised at how long poor performers lasted, and I believe those people would have been canned much sooner at a comparable financial services company. However, on the other hand, this was a rare event, and in a department of this size (30), I never let a poor performer or two affect me personally. My biggest con was the peer review system that we had in place for reviewing work before it was sent to clients. If a coworker made a mistake that was deemed “critical,” you were expected to dish out a “critical error.” Deciding what was a critical error was somewhat arbitrary; some coworkers had unspoken alliances to NOT give each other critical errors; some people who received errors took it way too personally b/c it was viewed as an attack on their pay (via the worthless statistics I mentioned earlier). If you actually did your job and gave out critical errors, you could expect payback. In the end, this led to a lot of unnecessary politicking, which somewhat diminished the culture. In a sense, managers outsourced the portion of their job that revolved around ‘evaluating employee performance’ by requiring everyone in the department to dish out critical errors in such a public manner, which I found to be quite obnoxious. Employee suggestions were solicited in several attempts to reform the system (which was noble of management), but the core problem remained. I actually thought of a way to fix the problem, but I was 1 of 30 people (1 of 90 when you include Denver) and I didn’t feel like embarking on such an uphill climb.