I thought I would provide an update on this since I received so many thoughtful replies when I first posted. I am still in the same position and coming up on three years in the role in February. It has been an up and down ride. Needless to say the red flags I initially saw when I first took the role have turned out to be largely true. But I can't say that it has been all bad. So I will start with the good first.
My role expanded substantially and this job has been very good for me financially. The short and sweet of it breaks down like this - my income in 2016 is 64% higher than when I left my last firm. I initially took about an 18% raise in base pay to join my current firm. I received another 17% raise in base pay about 15 months ago as well as a formal promotion. I manage a team of 3 (4 including me). I also have a 15% target bonus (from base salary) that gets paid out as long as the company is performing well and I am an "average" employee. No issues there. In 2014 our department was struggling so badly and people leaving left and right that my current boss gave me a $15,000 retention bonus that was paid out over 18 months. The last payment on that was July of this year. In addition, the promotion I received led not only to an increase in salary but also for restricted stock units for the company. They do not vest until 2019 and 2020, but it is great to have them as I will either still be with the firm or will be able to use them to negotiate compensation at another company. So financially I can't complain at all about this role. It has been a blessing and in my opinion has set me up well for future roles. I didn't even ask for any of these things. My boss came to me with every one of them.
The other positives have been that there have been some projects that have come up that I have enjoyed and the fact that I was moved into a position where I manage a team again has been great. One of my fears taking this role was that I was giving up managing to be an individual contributor again. So to be back in a position to manage has been great. There are some corporate dynamics that have limited my ability to hire some talent I would have liked to bring on, but overall I have some younger folks on my team and I enjoy coaching them and helping them grow. Having the control over a number of aspects of my role has been great and it has allowed me to do a lot of things my way. I have also made some positive relationships with a number of senior leaders throughout the firm and have been recognized as a strong employee. This is very important to me as I think our departments reputation has continued to remain poor, so I am glad I have been able to at least do work at a level that has been recognized as higher quality. I was offered a position to join another team a few months back based on the reputation I have developed and ultimately turned it down because I felt I would just be running away from my current role into something I am not very interested in doing. But I guess the point is that I have had enough success that I have made that type of positive impression on senior leaders at the firm. These are all positives.
But there have been a number of negatives as well. In my last post I noted how my job function was split into a qualitative role (what I manage) and a quantitative piece. I also referenced that someone new had been hired to manage the quantitative team and that I thought he would help stabilize things. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He has only made the accountability issues worse than they were before. He will not commit to anything, misses every deadline and does so almost blatantly. He will say everything is on target and then at the last minute everything is in red status. He openly talks about how lazy he is. This is not a joke or exaggeration either. He thinks it’s a joke and part of his charm, but it’s ridiculous. He will openly talk on the floor, where other departments work close to us, and say how lazy he is and how he doesn’t want to have to do anymore work. We are a highly regulated industry so spend a lot of time meeting with government officials, and his demeanor in meetings is just completely unprofessional. He refers to the work that his team does as a “hack job” and alludes to “all quants being lazy” in meetings with our regulators. Lately, people in the bank and externally have gotten very critical of the work that he and his team have done and started to poke holes in it. He gets offended and emotional in meetings and starts yelling and being combative with our business partners and superiors. It’s just a bad look for the department.
It has reached the point where I can’t really do my job as effectively as I should be able to because he is a roadblock to everything and my boss will always support him. Any idea presented to him he shoots it down because he doesn’t want to do more work. Most of the discussions we have about these things include our boss and she doesn’t enforce anything or hold him or his team to any standards. He has hired a team of young graduates with no experience and conditioned them to not respect anyone’s time but their own so we have a team of 25-30 year olds who come and go as they please and have done nothing to integrate themselves into company culture.
To add to this, I really don’t think this guy is smart. He has some fancy degrees attached to his name, but I really believe that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. His job function is heavily quantitative and every other job function we work with across the bank has similarly skilled people in it. They have questioned his work from day one and think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Our department’s reputation has not improved at all. We are still considered to be a low performing department across the firm (and quite frankly we are), and our reputation is getting worse it seems. I may be overreacting about our reputation getting worse, but it is certainly not improving. We are now starting to get similar feedback from our government regulators who were incredibly critical of a report his team generated. They called it ineffective and unreliable and during our meeting with them said they think the math his team applied is wrong and inaccurate.
It’s a very weird situation to be in. I think my team has been able to separate ourselves from the quantitative team that we work with and has developed a decent reputation, but I still feel we are dragged down a bit by association. I think the department is a total mess and lacks accountability, and has since day one. I blame my boss because she lets it occur. The only way I can describe it is that it is like watching someone enable an alcoholic. I don’t say that lightly either because alcoholism runs in my family and I have had to deal with the effects of it in my own life. The behavior of my boss with this peer is just comparable to the enabling I have seen in my own family dealing with it.
I can’t be mad at my peer or his team because he is allowed to get away with the nonsense that he is. I have had multiple conversations with my boss this past year about my issues with the department and she has done nothing. And it has not been for lack of information. I have been very blunt with what I perceive to be the problems. She is just incredibly passive and I think her mindset is that we need to work it out between us, but it’s beyond that. For change to occur she needs to take action and she has proven she is unwilling to do so.
The plus for me is that despite all the things I have just described it has made for a very easy work environment for me during some major life changes. I got married in September last year. My wife and I bought a house in May. And our daughter was born a week and a half ago. So despite the flaws, this job has worked out very well during some major life events, and provided some financial stability that has allowed us to get through these major events without incurring any debt (except for the mortgage on our home). But I have reached the point where I need to move on and plan to start looking for something new both internally and externally. Bonus payout is in March so I am targeting that for when I would make a change. I am not particularly challenged in this role and don’t really feel like I am utilizing my skills in the best possible way. I have a pretty good idea of what I am looking for and plan to apply for roles that fit that idea. I am open to staying at the firm if a position opens up, but I don’t want to make a move just to make a move internally. My job is easy and I can ride it out until I get the right fit.
This has been a very interesting experience to say the least since I came to this company to get away from a bad situation only to walk into one that has never been all that good, at least from the standpoint of being part of a strong department and doing challenging work. A learning experience for sure, but I am glad I have stuck it out for three years, if only for the resume stability. My next position will definitely be one that I take because it’s the right fit rather than just to get away from something. [FONT="][/FONT]
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