RBC reviews

I can only speak of Capital Markets Technology. In general, technical talents are not at all respected here as your ultimate goal is to serve traders who treat you like some inferior species . Thus the engineering culture is pretty non-existent just like most other banks in Toronto. The technologies are years behind: SVN, Visual Basic, JDK < 1.8, Windows 7 and IE are still quite active in many teams. Devs have very limited access to resources and the internal access control is unnecessarily strict. Codebase is mediocre and sometimes bizarre if written by offshore contractors. You won't be seeing a lot of smart people who are passionate about technologies and are willing to spend their spare time learning the latest technologies and best engineering practices here.

unfortunately this list will be much longer, so here we go - lots of turnover: i was at the bank for five years, much longer than most people last there. in my time, i saw my group almost completely turnover twice (i.e. they fired everyone in my group and then hired a new group) - distant management: you can certainly talk to your direct manager but try talking to a higher level manager and you'll be put in your place - incompetent management: lower management can fly under the radar for years (and i've witnessed it) without upper management doing much to stop them - they're mostly just concerned about keeping their own jobs. you see this trickle down as non-management also is mostly concerned with keeping their jobs/getting bonuses rather than actually doing their jobs well - low pay: not competitive pay - you do not get paid based on how much commission you made or your trade profits: you get paid based on how much you throw your coworkers under the bus - come bonus time (around the fall), you'll notice people trying to jockey for bigger parts of the bonus pool. instead of focusing on how they can serve their clients best, they try to complain to management about how everyone else is terrible if you're a brown-noser type of worker, you may succeed here. unfortunately, if you're actually focused on serving clients, it's best to go elsewhere.