Pros
They do provide decent employment benefits, including 16 weeks paid paternity leave and even more maternity leave. The non executive employees are pretty great for the most part on the E*TRADE side. I’ve worked with some of the best coworkers I’ve ever had here.
Cons
The Morgan Stanley executives do not understand what E*TRADE is and continually make decisions that negatively impact employees and customers. The same people who ran the retail trading side of Morgan Stanley into the ground are now in charge and doing the exact same thing to E* TRADE. They do not care about you unless you have a couple million dollars to invest with them. Even non management Morgan Stanley employees (such as financial advisors) speak to and treat E*TRADE employees like dirt. It’s like they are actively trying to make your job harder. Morgan Stanley management is very open that they care about sales and not customer service even in what used to be customer service roles. E*TRADE was about trying to provide world class service and doing the right thing, Morgan Stanley is about profits while making themselves look good. They even went so far as to mandate participation in global volunteer month, which they then used to boost their own image by bragging about how much time their employees spent volunteering in their communities. I don’t mind volunteering and appreciated that E*TRADE always offered paid volunteer time, but mandating it to make your company look better feels very wrong to me. It’s just an easy way for the company to be like “look how great we are!” without actually really doing anything.