Low quality - Software Engineer Morgan Stanley Employee Review

1.0
7 Nov 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

It is hard to recommend working for this company, however: Excellent education and learning plans. Easy to work from home (even with short notice) Pay is good Good place to stay for a short while just to learn how NOT to do programming/software development. If you want to coast, then this is the place. If you just keep your head down and shut up in meetings you can linger there forever.

Cons

Indoctrination, they hire grads and interns with little or no experience and drill into them that this is a great place to be. After which it is impossible to carry a healthy self-critical conversation with them. The propaganda posters are the worst with their graphs of unlabelled axis touting how great the company is. Institutionalized workforce, they want to mould you to be a "Morgan Stanley" employee. With as little transferable skills as possible. Build everything in house to keep people from acquiring real skills (they even went far enough attempt to build their own programming language). A lot of the younger crowd don't realise this until it is too late. Dull eyes. Lack of talent, the bar is set so incredibly low that you almost have to dig for it. Technical skill of the average programmer is mediocre at best. But their boasting is through the roof, most suffer from a serious case of the Dunning–Kruger effect. Don't even start me on the strats, that sorry bunch of hacks. Overall lack of motivation, no body cares about anything. All talk and no action. People have meetings about having meetings about other meetings and then they go home. Nothing gets done. And if by accident something is done, it is done in the absolutely the worst lacklustre way possible. Political nightmare, nobody seems to be doing any work as they're all busy pointing fingers blaming everyone else, sorry I meant "escalating". People actively inject themselves into conversations that have nothing to do with them. Everybody is scrambling for their own little intern/grad/indian to "manage". Going to team/dept drinks is nothing short of a sickening brown-nosing session which most managers lap up (as most deliberately surround themselves with yes-people). Severely backwards when it comes to technology and software. They're still running on WindowsXP in 2012. Nothing gets upgraded until it is already out-dated, which is a favourite complaint on the in-house mailing list. Actively hostile environment to software developers. Development environment crash constantly (i.e. Visual Studio and Eclipse) due to over-the-top restrictive access controls and antiquated OSs. C++ devs have it the best but only because they use Textpad or something even more primitive. Computers are slow, software is slow, people are slow, EVERYTHING IS SLOW!

Explore other reviews about Morgan Stanley

5.0
25 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great people, welcoming, Mentorship is very prioritized

Cons

Bit of a steep learning curve but that is everywhere in financial world

3.0
30 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Very good co-workers, Great technology stack. Lot of new technologies and integration with current work.

Cons

They dont even give you a MS cup. They ask you to buy it for 5$. So cheap! Management big on "Giving back", Immediate managers do not like it and are not supportive. Lay off employees twice a year to show profits. Only worried about shareholders and clients. Don't know the criteria for lay-off. So, you are always worried if it is your turn. They boast about mental health and wellness. No good, when they layoff employees like this. HR = Horrible Resources. When you are laid off, they shoo you away as if you are a fly. You feel miserable. They themselves say - "We are better than Facebook or Oracle. We dont fire you at 6 AM over email." Gosh! What a comparison!

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