FINRA reviews

FINRA is still a company of contractors and poor planning. They are planning to lay off or push out half of each of most of the teams on the tech side as the aws migration finishes up. Most people on the hardware side expect it and understand it, but the irony is, finra would be better off keeping its technical talent and slicing out all of middle management and some of the vps. This is a company of too many chefs and not enough cooks—and most of the chefs are ones you’d see getting yelled at by Gordon Ramsey for sucking so bad to extend the metaphor. Finra is full of nontech managers who use their employees knowledge as their own and make technical decisions without discussing with their technical team first. I can count on my hand the managers that are technical and know what they are doing. But, even then finra is company of fiefdoms as well on the tech side. One team builds a tool that is similar to what another team is working on, instead of working together for something bigger and better, both teams waste time building a different version of the same thing!! Even better, the senior management push to get every app in the cloud by a certain date is such a hardline that developers and literally forced to send unfinished apps into prod. They run deployments and literally tell ops they don’t know how to support or run it and this is prod. Core apps are breaking and crashing and those same tech teams get laid off as managers who caused this problem in the first place sit back. Finra is on the cusp of really dying right now. Major contracts have been lost as well—because management is not letting technical folks work together to build a better product.

When the recruiter contacted me, she sent me the job description which said I will spend 70% of my time doing development work and 30% of my time doing testing work. As a matter of fact, I spend 80% of my time creating test data using Excel and 20% of my time figuring out how to work around some internal tools. Before going to interview, they sent me some information about SDET in Microsoft and let me thought that SDET is a position to write testing framework and that there will be testers to perform testing. During interview, they asked Java/SQL questions and I thought I probably will write Java/SQL. But in day-to-day work, I don't even get assigned to write SQL because I am a SDET in FINRA AKA Tester. (They don't have Tester in FINRA. SDET IS TESTER) During interview, I asked is there any difference between SDET and Tester; they said SDET will do both development and testing work. In reality, if you are proactive and lucky enough, you will spend 5% of your time to work on testing framework. I am basically a SQL tester in FINRA. Once I got into the company, I spent a week to work on a 4-year-old / out-dated orientation documents. There was no useful onboard training and on boarding can be really painful for some of the new hires. It is almost impossible to internally transfer to other groups or roles, though they say you can always switch to another group or roles during interview. That is not the truth. I have already worked as a tester for 3 years and talked with them a couple of times but I don't see any sign that they will convert me to real development role. They place developers in testing positions and call them SDETs. SDET in FINRA is not real SDET. If you are a developer. DON'T GO TO THEIR SDET POSITION. CAREER DEAD END FOR DEVELOPER.