Burnout upon joining State Street
I joined State Street this year as a VP, after spending most of my career in enterprise IT, and am struggling with the culture adjustment.
The environment in my group feels extremely work-heavy. 12+ hour days and weekend work seem normalized, and there’s a constant pressure to always be online. Meetings regularly run over, priorities change constantly (if they're even defined), and a lot of decisions seem to happen informally among South Asian managers and reports before broader discussions even take place. Our group is over 70% Indian.
I came in expecting to work in cybersecurity, but a big portion of my time now goes toward fixing presentations, spreadsheets, and rewriting materials because my AVP support is inconsistent. Peers and directs can't grasp written or spoken comms, let alone the subject matter.
Another issue is staffing. There’s talk of tighter budgets and there's a mandate to only hire offshore, which makes me question long term growth opportunities here.
For people who’ve worked in financial services cyber or tech roles, are there firms that genuinely have better culture and work-life balance? I’ve looked at places like JPM, BNY, Vanguard, BlackRock, etc., but I’m not sure whether the problem is specific to custodian banks or just finance in general.
Curious where people ended up after leaving this side of the industry, especially if you came from a more traditional tech background.