MS in a nutshell from an IT perspective - Associate Software Engineer Developer Morgan Stanley Employee Review

4.0
Jan 17, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Lots of smart people who are very hardworking. They come from a variety of backgrounds and always give their best efforts. Employees and consultants are treated pretty much the same. If you're doing any kind of IT work, everyone is pretty much standardized and work is delegated based on technology and business experience. If you want to get the "best" work, you have to know everything about it beforehand. Compensation is good and also guaranteed. I used to work in an IB that didn't give me bonuses due to the small size of my team and my rank. MS gives you a cut end of story, but that doesn't mean it's good. Benefits are also good. You get decent coverage from the basic medical plans offered. Depending on your team and nature of your project, the work from home policy is pretty lax. A lot of co-workers have families and commute into the city so sometimes they need to be home.

Cons

Work can get repetitive. Many times I find myself doing a glorified refactoring of poorly written or poorly planned code. You'd think there would be an extensive process in check to prevent poor code from going into production, but that's not the case. Teams need to enforce their own code review and audit policies and sometimes that's difficult when you are trying to hit big deadlines. IT support staff could use some work. There are no doubt talented individuals who keep good notes and are very good at drilling down issue solutions, but that doesn't save QA overall from being a giant sink. I think the QA teams need to be closely situated with the developers and create their test-cases co-dependently so they can actually understand the software; otherwise, developers may as well be the first point of contact. Ranking and compensation improvement is slow. There's a big bureaucracy in place for promotions and it can be very frustrating to work year after year without seeing any improvement. Getting ahead requires you to be very social which is not always the easiest thing to do.

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5.0
May 25, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great people, welcoming, Mentorship is very prioritized

Cons

Bit of a steep learning curve but that is everywhere in financial world

3.0
May 30, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Very good co-workers, Great technology stack. Lot of new technologies and integration with current work.

Cons

They dont even give you a MS cup. They ask you to buy it for 5$. So cheap! Management big on "Giving back", Immediate managers do not like it and are not supportive. Lay off employees twice a year to show profits. Only worried about shareholders and clients. Don't know the criteria for lay-off. So, you are always worried if it is your turn. They boast about mental health and wellness. No good, when they layoff employees like this. HR = Horrible Resources. When you are laid off, they shoo you away as if you are a fly. You feel miserable. They themselves say - "We are better than Facebook or Oracle. We dont fire you at 6 AM over email." Gosh! What a comparison!

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