Pros
- Nice colleagues who understand the pains the mature firm is going through in trying to modernize itself
- Benefits
- good for new graduates or people new to the investment industry
Cons
1) Pay
- known for paying on the lower end
2) Flat/decentralized Org Structure
- Tried to implement the "push decision-making down" operating model. However, for this company, this has led to a lack of ownership and accountability. "if no one else is saying anything, why should I?" Individuals and teams look to be too comfortable with this arrangement of no direct ownership, causing an unwillingness to speak up and be proactive.
3) Typical Vendor Mentality (Expected)
- Overescalation of client questions and feedback. Sales and CSMs take the feedback of a single individual user out of thousands/tens of thousands of users as a representation of the whole, causing everyone to run around like a chicken with their head cut off and pointing fingers.
- A big habit of valuing short-term patch-worked solutions to just get things out the door and or get a notch on one's belt, which causes a lot of technical debt and data gaps.
4) Mumbai
- Last I heard before I left, was that between 30%-40% of Mstar's entire workforce was located in the Mumbai office, which has a turnover rate of about 30%.
- The old Direct side of the business was just put under someone in Mumbai, which signals the start of a countdown. Everyone knows that Pitchbook and how it operates is the future for Morningstar.
5) Lots of tenured or pre-IPO employees holding on to their options
- think upside-down bell curve with lots of people with less than 3-4 yrs at Mstar, few in the middle, and lots at the other end at around the 20+ yr mark. This bullet is more of an observation from what I personally observed.
- makes updating legacy systems or processes a pain if they happen at all, as a good chunk of the leaders are "just used to things."
