Upper management has no direction other than trying to keep the lights on and maintain their bloated salaries.
Middle Management is staffed with the Merrill Lifer’s. They focus on if you were five minutes late back from lunch and always saying "yes" to upper management. They are given a management title because they are power hungry, will work long hours for under market management pay, and get off on having an office vs. a cube. Merrill's middle management would not survive 1 week at another large corporation because they would get laughed out of the building. Their sole purpose is to act as a non-challenging mouth piece for upper management to tell the remaining employees that haven't been laid off that the company doesn't have the budget for any wage increases.
I was an IT employee for 7 1/2 years with Merrill. They haven't shown any worthwhile investments towards technology in over 5 years. Servers are overworked and outdated. Infersturture is a joke, and developers are let loose to write code with no real process or QA. Database integrity is non-existent due to the fact that there isn't enough trained staff to properly maintain it.
The bottom line is this company is failing at all levels. The only reason they have stayed afloat over the past 18 months is because of lost salary (layoffs) and the fact that they have the State of California as a client. Unfortunately, the business Merrill does with the State of California is election based. Therefore, Merrill will not make any substantial gains from this account for another 4 years.
