Toxic work environment and no engineering culture - Senior Software Engineer KeyBank Employee Review

1.0
19 Jan 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Good work/life balance - Excellent PTO - Great coworkers (until most of them left due to the many cons listed below)

Cons

- Engineering culture is virtually non-existent. Keybank is still very much a waterfall company that has contractors do most of the software development work. In house engineers have the same level of trust and responsibilities as contractors, which means you have no influence on product and software architecture decisions. Prepare to turn off your creative brain and just develop whatever your told. - Engineering teams are siloed from each other that there is no shared accountability for delivering great products. As long as your team does their small part of the puzzle, your team is in the clear even though the overall software product you are working on is in shambles. - Employee moral is abysmal, which leads to a toxic work environment. 3/4 of the HelloWallet employees who came over from the Keybank acquisition have left. Common employee issues were raised to upper level management and HR and they just turned a blind eye. Instead of trying to boost suffering moral, upper level management just takes away office amenities that further degrades moral. - Upper level management has made countless questionable product decisions. A large product initiative was mandated from upper level management, but our day to day work doesn’t work towards that initiative at all. KPIs also don’t reflect the day to day work and upper level management doesn’t seem to realize that and scolds the team for not meeting them.

Explore other reviews about KeyBank

5.0
4 Mar 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good Growth Potential and Learning Experience

Cons

Must stay on the retail track if you receive a return offer

2.0
7 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- 7% 401(k) match (although only funded once a year) - $500 Wellness credit to use towards a gym membership, new work clothes, college tuition and so on. - Not too pad when it comes down to PTO policy.

Cons

- Extremely old technology. - Bad products (it’s hard to sell when your products are simply bad). - Everything takes twice as long to happen at KeyBank (when it comes down to processes). Everything is manual, nothing is automated. - Commission pay is all over the place, extremely hard to understand and unreliable. There are so many rules about what qualifies for commission and what doesn’t that it’s hard to keep up. - As a licensed banker, you will compete with your non-licensed teammates for investment referrals. - Cheap company. Instead of hiring more people, they will use a Private Client Banker at the teller line if needed. - Banks open Saturday. - Paperwork for every single small thing. - Commission pay for licensed bankers is at the mercy of your Private Client Advisor. If they forget to add your name when closing an investment deal, you get nothing. It happens quite often in every single branch. - Expensive health insurance plans. - Not a lot of growth opportunities if you aren’t in WA or Ohio.

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