Did you ever accept a job and it turned out to be nothing like you expected? I did, and I don't want to do that again. After joining BNY Mellon, I realized figuring out a potential employer's vibe beforehand is crucial. I'm still not sure how to properly do it, though. How do you get a feel of the work atmosphere before diving in?
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@8yky+1pAS2kVj,
I provided as many details as possible. I can't think of any other that would be relevant, but here are a few other tidbits:
Since leaving the large package delivery company (UPS), I've had a very successful career, where I did transfer internally a few times and eventually left BNYM in 2015. I initiated each of these moves with the purpose of advancing my career. I have never experienced anything like I did at UPS when switching jobs since. Whenever I joined a new group, the actual work was either spot-on or reasonably close to the type of work I was told I would be doing. I'm close to retirement now and will probably hang up my keyboard in five or six years.
Those eight or nine months that I spent in HR Systems at UPS was by far the lowest point in my career, and probably my life. During this time, one coworker told me that she too had been misled about what she was going to be working on when she Joined our group from the outside. Another two people from this group told me a time when our direct manager went on vacation for two weeks and didn't leave any work for the group. When the manager returned, she demanded to know why the group hadn't completed the assignment she gave to them. They swore that no such assignment was given. This was not a well-managed department.
I bumped into a coworker from my original group a few years after I left. She shed some light on what might have caused my whole situation when joining this department: the head of HR System was the former head of Customer Service up untill the late 80's. Prior to that there was no real competition to UPS, so their customer service was notoriously bad. It was not uncommon for a rep to just hang up on a customer, because who else where they going to use? Then FedEx grew to become an alternative to UPS. UPS wanted to improve their customer server and probably wanted to get rid of her, but they didn't lay people off back then, so they again probably moved her to a place she would cause the last amount of damage, and that was HR Systems.
This was the first time she managed IT professionals, so when I interviewed with her, she either didn't understand what I was telling her, or she didn't understand how important it was to me.
And finally, for some reason, only my direct manager in HR Systems had a user ID to log into production, none of her employees had one. Programmers need to login to production to see how things really work. I had a production ID in my former group. At the time, I thought she was just lazy and didn't want to submit the requests, but now that I think about it, it was probably because production contained employee info that they wanted to keep private, but our development data was copied from production, so I don't know.
The way that she got around this was she gave all her employees her ID AND PASSWORD! This shocked me. One late night after everyone had left but me, I needed to log into production. I entered her ID and password and the first attempted failed. I tried again and the second attempt failed. I think because I was so frustrated with my situation, I tried it a third time and when it failed, it locked her ID.
A few days later she came around and asked each of us if we locked her ID. I told her it wasn't me and she moved on. She must have known it was me, because after that all her other employees got the new password, but I didn't. LOL
Do you have anymore details on this story?
Interesting. I worked there over that span and wasn’t aware of the legal name.
Thanks for your post.
@2tid - There was indeed a "Mellon Financial" . Per a history of the company:
"In 1999, Martin G. McGuinn became chairman and chief executive officer of Mellon Bank Corporation. Mellon Bank Corporation then became Mellon Financial Corporation. " The legal name remained Mellon Financial Corporation up until Bob Kelly made the worst mistake ever by selling MFC to BoNY. Please don't make assertions without checking facts first.
There was never a Mellon Financial. There was Mellon Bank, which BONY bought, destroyed and looted our pensions.
You're right, my mistake: It was BNY at the time in late 1993.
@1vbo+1pAS2kVj 30 years old is year 1993 that could be Inautix a tech company which bny acquired. Since this thread is about researching companies happy to know you got your career break from not so great tech company now.
Would you be able to clarify further? Would like to know more details.
Long story short . Curious to know 🤔 on the previous thread , you joined Bny or Mellon Financials? Your story dates back to 30 year old which is 2003 before the merger took place because back then Mellon was a much better and a dynamic Company . Bny lobbied very hard for the merger when Mellon wasn't interested. Once Mellon was a Gem of Pittsburgh until bny comes in destroys it.
Do I have a story about this: My employer before BNYM was a large package delivery company. I got the job out of college as a computer programmer working on batch mainframe systems, utilizing COBOL/JCL and VSAM. This was the early 90's, so I wanted to work on CICS and DB2, since that was the "hot" thing at the time. I read several books to prepare myself and knew I could work on these technologies, even though I hadn't. Our department only had batch applications, so I never got the chance. I needed to make a move.
I put in for a transfer, and my current department head suggested that I meet with the head of HR System, as they did lots of CICS and DB2, she came from there, so she would know.
I met with the head of HR System and stated six times that I wanted to make a move, because I wanted to work on CICS and DB2. It was my answer to the "Why do you want to move here?" question, and I worked it into several other answers, where it even seemed out of place.
She indicated that I would definetly get to work on CICS and DB2 in her department. She did mention that they had some batch systems, so she though I would spend half my tme CICS/DB2 and the other half on batch work. This was 50% more CICS/DB2 then I was getting to do now, so I agreed. She agreed to transfer me to HR System. I was so excited, I took a week off before joining my new dapartment just to reread all my CICS/DB2 training books!
The day came and I moved to HR. On that day, I met for the first time my immediate manager. She asked me what technologies I had work on. I told her that in the three years at the company, I had worked on COBOL/JCL and VSAM. With a sourpuss on her face, she told me that that wans't a lot and most people who came to the company from outside had done more than that. I was a little surprised by her comment, and didn't say anything. I was borderline cockey at that point in my career, so I though, "wait till the CICS/DB2 assignments start coming in, and I will show her what I can do."
That same day, I got my first assignment. It was an enhancement to a very large batch/IMS system. IMS was a precursor to DB2, but really had almost nothing in common with DB2. It was not a desirable technology to work on, as it had failed in the marketplace, because it was very difficult to work with, and is not used by many companies. She told me it should take me about six months to complete the enhancement.
I was disapointed in this assignment, but naively thought it was just luck of the draw, and my next assignment would contain CICS/DB2. It quickly became apparent to me that my coworkers wanted nothing to do with this batch/IMS applicaiton. Whenever I asked someone a simple question about the system, they would remove themselves from the conversation after not answering the question. Some made an excuse to leave, and some just walked away.
As I delved into the code, I started to see why my coworkers wanted nothing to do with this system. the system was in terrible disrepair. It was running in produciton, but in development it was a total mess: For one thing the IMS database was curropted in development, and our DBA knew nothing about IMS, which was understandable since IMS was so out-of-date. And another thing was they were missing source code for a few of the programs. They did have documentation for the system in ten phone book sized folders, but the print on each page was so faded that you needed a magnifying glass just to read about half the words on each page. It was like trying to read hyroglifics.
So there I was working seven days a week, twelve plus hours a day learning this system, learning IMS and trying to make the enhancement on a dissster of a system. I was working so many hours and so worried about if I was going to be able to make the enhancement, let alone make the deadline that my health started to suffer.
Every few weeks or so, my manager would come to my desk and ask me to write a program for another one of their systems. This took time from working on the massive system, but I didn't mind since it might be a chance to work on CICS/DB2. To my horror, none of these extra assignments involved any CICS/DB2. They were all batch COBOL/JCL VSAM.
About four months at the new department, my manager came over to my desk and to give me the fifth such extra assignment to write a program. I asked and she told me that this was a batch COBOL/JCL VSAM program. I mentioned to her that I came to this department to work on CICS/DB2 and asked why that was not happening. She looked at me and said, "I have no plans for you to work on CICS or DB2 now or anytime in the future."
I tend to clam up when someone says something to me that I don't expect and this case was no exception. I could tell she was annoyed by my question, so I said nothing.
Later that day, I made an appointment to discuss this with the head of HR Systems who had told me that I would be working on CICS/DB2 at least half of the time. I naively thought we would clear this up and my manager would be told what I was promised.
In this meeting, she told me that it was not up to her what I worked on, but my manager had final say on my assignments. I couldn't believe what was happening. I wouldn't let this go, and I initiated meetings with her almost every week to complain about this. I explained to her how important to me this issue was, and was my entire motivation for transfering to her department.
Around the third or fourth such meeting, the wheels came off: It started getting really nasty. My attitude was not the best and she would growl at me to get out of her office and go back to MY job. I was shocked at how quickly things degenerated. I was basically treated like a pariah in the department from that point on.
Shortly after this, we got a new employee in the department, fresh out of college. She sat near me, and I could tell that she was working on CICS/DB2. What the heck? I immediately knocked on the head of HR Systems' door and asked why an individual who just started out of college was getting to work on CICS/DB2 and I was not. For some reason, she focused on the fact that I did not use the person's name as some great offense, and it quickly degenerated into a get out of my office moment.
Then a week or two after that, It came to my attention that the system that I worked in my original department was going to be rewritten in CICS/DB2. It was like I was living a comedy, but I wasn't laughing. So if I had just stayed where I was originally, I would've gotten to work on a large CICS/DB2 project to rewrite a system I was very familiar with.
On this original system that was now slated to be rewritten, I worked with an analyst. We were the only two people that worked on that system, and we did some great work. This system was very important and saved the company a lot of money each year. We each did about 50% of the analysis and coding and came up with and implemented great suggestions to make the system even better.
And then it got even better: This anaylst informed me that he was going to receive a special award from the company for how well the system had been maintained for the past few years. I, five months removed from that system, was to receive nothing.
Anyway, I missed the six month timeframe for making the enhancement to the massive batch/IMS system, and took he-l for it. Then one Friday I had a great day: in the afternoon the development IMS database finally was working. I was able to finally find a DBA at the company that knew IMS and have him instruct our DBA on what to do. Then later that evening at around 9pm, with the benefit of finally being able to run some of the programs against the database, I had a breakthrough and for the first time felt that I would be able to complete this enhancement. I think it was a combination of finally having the database up and fianlly learning enough IMS.
I figured it would take about two more months of work. And then it hit me: I knew I had to leave the company. There was no future in this department. They were never going to let me work on what I wanted, and my reputation had been destroyed, over these past five or so months.
I was going to have to make a lateral move to another company as a batch COBOL programmer, as no company would let me do CICS/DB2 with no experience. I would sort of be starting over and have to prove myself. At that time, it took about one month to get a new job, so I figured about two weeks before I finished this enhancement, I would start applying to jobs.
Everything went according to plan: I sent my resume to a headhunter two weeks before the change went into produciton. The change went into production, and my manager gave me my next assignment, which was another large, old disaster of a system that didn't use CICS or DB2.
Then about two weeks after the enhancement went into production, I got a job offer from BNY, after two interviews. It was a batch COBOL job with, but with a 25% increase in salary. Telling the head of HR that I was leaving was very satisfying. she made a childish comment about how they were just about to assign some CICS/DB2 work to me. Right. I did give her an alternative that if she transfered me back to my department and system, I would withdraw my resignation. That system was just starting the project to rewrite the system in CICS/DB2 and I really wanted to work on it. She told me that she would transfer me back there.
The following morning, she came over to my desk and asked me to follow her. She walked me over to the HR office and left without saying anything. I went in and realized that this was my exit interview, as there was no transfer.
After a few years at BNYM, I finally got to work on CICS/DB2. Then shortly after that moved on to much greater things and my career really took off. That nighmare transfer happened to me about thirty years ago, but it still evokes a little anger in me.
This was a clear example of what I like to call "New Guy Syndrome". This is where a group has some very undesirable work that their regular employees do not want to do, so they wait for a new worker, because they know the new worker can't say no.
You will find the answers that you want through networking. Never view yourself as a permanent lifer and be sure to work as a contractor as well. You’ll get a lot of experience quickly as you grow your network.
I’m sorry to hear about your experience. It’s hard to know what the culture is like before you join.
It's beautiful outside . I took that chance after 12 years of toxic culture at BNYM. I am happy now . It's not a Big Bank but great Leaders to work with. BNY has a reputation of being old fashioned. Look at the way Boomers openly criticize millenials here. In my new job I found the best mentors as Boomers here who will support you to grow. Bny is a safe playground for Boomers who are stuck there for long , it is their position to thrive since it uses outdated tools and resources to conduct daily activities, plus superficial Audit and risk department increasing more and more paperwork, whereas my new company is more technology driven, not just useless tech bny uses but the most efficient ones. Please take that chance with the leap of faith, and leave that toxic workplace soon, you will learn and grow.