Having worked for several banks and IT firms, I noticed in Citi is there is a huge Rat Race. Every one is insecure about their job. Fear to share. Fear to discuss. Fear to collaborate. Fear to try new things. Fear to voice out. Fear to speak up.
Everything is templated. Just copy-paste. Some one initiates the template (say DevOps or JIRA), every other team is following the same without even a small change (Including the mistakes done by previous team). Diversity is not just DEI. Its also in how you operate.
The goal of the Citi New Way was to solve this problem. But the questions are in trash. VOE is another tool to identify and punish the employees. Now there is zero trust on VOE.
After all Drama's, Fear to work, Fear of layoff and Micromanagement. Citi is going Nowhere but to its greatest downfall. There is NO Creativity, NO Challenges, NO tryouts, NO failures, NO Cries, NO recognition, NO hikes, NO bonus, NO promotions.
Finally NO hope of surival or success.
Citi employees are lacking even basic rights that the consultants get from their vendor companies.
Everyone is looking to Jump.
6 replies (most recent on top)
Of mice and men. Feel sorry for your circumstances. However, your experience isn’t ubiquitous.
Citi is an old albatross. Outdated. Obsolete. Slow.
At meetings it is clear the disconnect between koolaid drunk managers and employees. Employees are not buying their fake feel good lies.
Citi fosters, encourages and nurtures very small management thinking. Don’t color outside the lines.
Every zoom call is the same. When a manager says something quasi funny, everyone goes off mute, looks at the camera and belts out some canned laughter. Most think to themselves, “I wasn’t paying attention but everyone is laughing, I better laugh too. Look at the camera and make sure the boss sees me chuckle. Ok, that’s enough…I think he bought it”. The higher up the manager, the louder and longer the laugh needs to be.
Some rat in my org emailed me this week and start asking about task I am working on. I provided the context and high level overview just to help, but he later emailed me asking to handover all the information that I have about the task out of blue. I told him to basically fu-k off in corporate way possible. At this point, Just tired of people trying to play games.
Agree with @jac+1rdMZQSy. If you see or identify any issue and say something, congrats you are the one that will have to fix it.
Here’s the catch, management will argue with you and say…..
You are allowed to innovate and be creative……but you better succeed 100% or its a considered a waste of time, loss of resources and it’ll show that you have no idea what you are doing. So, no one thinks outside the box.
If you try something outside of the template and there’s any issue at all, whether what you did caused it or not, you’ll still get the blame because you went outside the template.
You are asked to bring solutions to the table but anything at all you bring up, better be guaranteed to work the very first time.
During meetings you are asked are there any problems. If you voice any, congratulations, you are now goaled with fixing that problem. In other words you are punished for speaking up. You have a complaint about an inventory system and goaling me to fix it is ridiculous as that’s not my area of expertise. . I don’t have to be a master mechanic to know my car isn’t running right but I do need someone who knows what they are doing in order to get it to working right. So everyone gets the message and says nothing going forward.
Fear you say, of course. That’s chapter 1 of the Citi management playbook. If it wasn’t there would be little traffic on this website. Its a tool used to get more out of you without paying you for the hours worked. How else could they afford to pay Jane’s new raise?
Precisely. It’s a rather well-kept secret in banking, but the cat is getting out of the bag.
The problem at Citi is that those selected by management to rise are not the ones who know how to close deals, but rather play the Citi game.