Visa Inc. reviews

The company is generally sliding downhill rapidly. The few innovations come from copying or buying outside. Management, at least in IT, all the way to the IT top, seem to be reading from their Indian-IT school textbooks To sum this up "Look busy and change the plans frequently if rapid results are not forthcoming." Everyone from Director and higher seems to be trying to implement their own plan, I suppose for later resume building. Teamwork is restricted to just a very few teams with decent managers (less than 5% of teams). Management between teams is fully territorial, with people believing that their way is the only way and never cooperating as this would be seen as backing down from their own plans. The morale and culture are the worst I've experienced. Top IT guy seems to believe his job is cheerleading, so there are 4-6 rah-rah meetings every month called "All-Hands". Hardly anyone even goes to these anymore, they have to send email to please sit up in the front for the cameras. These meetings always start 10-20 minutes late. (I mention these details not as the worst of the environment, but just as small examples to show how far the poor culture has seeped.) There are at least 3, and often 10 or more, layers of project planners for each project. Of course, all but two of these (the top layer and the bottom layer) are just playing the telephone game and regurgitating what they heard from below. Often the actual source of the information is not allowed at the meeting that reports it (to protect the middle manager jobs). So almost all meetings end up a waste of time, where people have to "take things offline" to go figure out the actual source and get the information directly. Generally speaking the VP and SVP layers are the worst of the non-value-adding staff. They don't want any decision made by others, so all meetings are hamstrung until the VP or SVP shows up to make a call. These VP's spend their days running from meeting to meeting pointing out the obvious. Since they are heavily overbooked (everyone needs them to move things forward, no delegation) they miss many meetings completely. This is accepted and implicitly excused as "they are so busy". Top execs rely on the annual HR survey for proof of the wonderful job they are doing. Everyone is pressured to complete the survey. Year after year the same areas are identified as poor performing areas -- but the next year and the year after that it is the same. Presentation of the results (at another All-Hands of course) is always marketing speak telling everyone how serious they are about changing these results. Now it appears VIsa is putting pressure on at least a couple VP's to come to Glassdoor and promise better for the future. Deja-vu. At least it appears a couple VP's are reading these comments.

CTO is arrogant with no understanding of Visa business and has been wasting precious resources on quixotic ideas. There is supposedly has been a project to move transaction processing to open systems from its mainframe base more than 2 years but we are replacing Unix by mainframe in Europe! Visa Developer platform is positioned as his great big vision but he does not realize that Visa has had API's for merchants and FI's forever. He does not understand that REST is just a protocol and FI's do not care about it.