Not a tech company, as they claim - Senior Software Development Engineer MetLife Employee Review

3.0
Feb 7, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

MetLife offers great benefits for the whole family. They offer generally good insurance for low premiums. There is a good balance between life and work. There are few times where the schedule isn’t 9-5, but when there are it’s usually because of bad project planning and management. MetLife is a huge company that has been around for literally 150 years. Although the work is not always fun, there is job security and potential for long-term growth. A lot of people have been working there for well over 10-15 years.

Cons

MetLife loves to claim that they are a “tech company” to attract software engineers, but in reality they are not. Their decisions are always based on the bottom line and never on the well-being of employees. In my opinion, tech companies invest in their engineers by creating budgets for learning and development. I don’t think MetLife offers any of this, but if they do, they surely do not promote it. Tech companies also allow engineers to drive the technical direction of teams. Managers are generally non-technical with backgrounds in project management or business. Tech decisions are driven by the bottom line. Horrible Oracle and Microsoft tools are used because of long-standing relationships between them and MetLife. Finally, it is super boring to be an engineer here. Nothing you build will have much of an impact and techs that are truly challenging to build are mostly outsourced. Keep in mind that I worked in an app development team. This may not be the case for every engineer.

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5.0
Apr 7, 2026
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Pros

Great culture that actually cares about customers and employees

Cons

Old school and Legacy environment

1.0
Jun 9, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good support for new people managers were very helpful and always available

Cons

Micromanage every second of your time; have to put in a request to go to the bathroom and wait for someone to grant it Expect you to put exceptions to your time after your shift ends on your own time Half hour lunch by the time I brought my lunch or heated my leftovers and went to the bathroom. I barely had time to wolf it down. Unrealistic call times Systems are horrible and crashing all the time expect you to be in at least 15 minutes before your shift unpaid to set up all the programs on your computer

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