Pros
Nice work- life balance if you want to as an employee. People in general open to socialising. Great place to start your career, either as intern or as a graduate right after bus school, more senior people are quite open to newcomer graduates. In case your position allows for engaging with global offices employees, it is an amazing place for exposing yourself to other distant cultures and learn from them. This also exciting when some big global transactions arise with lots of learning involved, helping to understand how the world really works via the finance lens.
Cons
Prepared to be very very diplomatic, even engage into lots of "politics", if you want to rise in the company ladder. Apparently this hold to all large organizations to some extent but in this bank the huge vested-interests of people in several levels is highly pronounced and noticeable phenomenon. (partially may also be country specific, hard to get a seat but it also hard to get sucked. Thus once people are hired do not really feel anxious about their jobs and combined with the fact that promotions or department transition opportunities are really limited after a while they lose their initial motivation (to some extent normal of course), almost every analyst around me felt that way) Not really meritocratic assessment of your performance: People overhead is relative high even in Managerial ranks with several layer of Management (to offset the fact of people staying in the same jobs for several years they give them a mgt title -without however increasing proportionally their salaries for the higher responsibilities they assume due to their new titles) which obviously should have people below them to manage whom they should also try to "keep motivated" despite not having a materially growing business and thus personnel to absorb the high achievers with promotions. That causes lots of trifle micro management and politics situations with no real value added in improving bank's processes (critical when you are a large IB, otherwise risky). In other words, it is a nice place for starting your career or even if you are just looking for a "safe and permanent" job but I would not suggest that you should think of it as a place that will be able to grow materially in your career as there are not even much internal movement opportunities within the organisation. Cultural tone comes from the top (remember the scandals and losses where practically no Management responsibility acknowledged so as to give the heads the sack!) - hope this changed. Lots of room for Management mindset shakeup.
