Citi reviews

3.6

65% would recommend to a friend

(36,594 total reviews)
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Jane Fraser

67% approve of CEO

57% positive business outlook

Citi has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 36,594 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Citi employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Finance industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

37K reviews
1.0
Sep 23, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

May be initial package. Later you will realize what big mistake you have done by accepting to join just for few extra bucks. There could be other good things but you wont be able to leverage them because of the culture created by mgmt. Leaves - So many but you wont be able to take it. Club mahindra - Forget it. You will anyways be able to take limited leaves so you can not plan anything. That has so many constraints as well and 30% of the amount has to be paid my employee. Annual health check up 8k - This is very important as your health will degrade by working here hence you atleast have a tool to measure it. Cab facility - wont matter because mgmt will schedule scrum calls when you have cabs. So you will always be worried for every single day that should I cancel cab today or not. Taking cab early is not an option because of workload. Later you wont be having any cab so you will eventually start coming by your own vehicle. WFH - A nightmare actually. Citi is misusing this policy. You will be asked to connect anytime, anyday because Citi has given wfh. Things to note here is you need to have your own laptop and proper internet. Internet bill will not be reimbursed (In COVID they started reimbursing for below AVP level). If you dont have proper system them mgmt will say Citi is paying you so much. Buy multiple screens. There are the words from my SVP. Diwali gift of around 2k valuation. As you can see most of these benefits are to lure new joiners to join the organization. These points have made jobs are HR very easy so that they can mention so many benefits working in Citi. These are just for branding the organization. In reality nothing exists on the ground which you will get to know when you are onboarded.

Cons

- There is no clarity on what exactly you need to do. If you ask your manager (terrible SVP's), they will not respond. You try to reach them by call/email/texts; they would still not respond. Then suddenly one day they will come up and ask where are we with this. Then you start telling them that requirement is not clear, we tried reaching out to you daily but no gains. Now the harassment starts. They will pressurize you to deliver in very short time, every day late night calls, daily requirements changing. You somehow deliver it but later you will get to know that was not at all used/required. There is no use of that feature. Then what was the need of so much unnecessary pressure ? - SVP's are so so horrible. They will scold you in front of whole team/floor. They would insult because you were not available on Sunday 2PM to attend SVP's call. You will be required to be available 24/7. You are offending management if your are not looking at whatsapp message and not acting accordingly (like responding, logging in to system etc.). Its a real expectation. If you don't do it get ready to be insulted very next day. - There is a constant fear daily. What's going to happen next now. Who is going to come up with unrealistic deadline. What exactly suddenly going to come to you in one line, for ex - build a private website, pull data from API's. Now go and understand what to pull, what to show, where to store data, which all API's. No one is going to respond you for any details. You would definitely need to coordinate with other teams but they also wont respond. Your SVP thinks that you are some god who would understand requirements on his own. Then mgmt. will keep on asking about the feature. When you say that no one is responding then that's also your fault. Its like - You don't know how to approach to different teams. - If a person is spending some time in cafeteria it means that the person is not LOADED with enough work. His manager will be called in by SVP to check why is he not LOADED enough. - There is no uses of any process or tools like Agile/jira. There is no BA,QA, Architect. You are just given things in a line. GO ahead and do it. - Leaves - They have so many leaves but man you can not take it. That's like a gold scuffle. This is just for HR to brand the company that we have so many leaves. Management wont let you take. If you take, SVP's will shout on floor or in meetings that you took one week leave 2 months ago, why do you need again. They will insult you till that level where after some time you would start neglecting all these people. You will go in very bad state mentally. - No work life balance. Forget about this, you will always be scared of what's going to happen now. - There is NO KT at all. Nothing on business side, nothing on tech side. You are expected to understand each and everything when the one liner requirements email comes. - SVP's are so fake. SO much interested in fake branding of their org to befool people. When you go inside, you are like what. Seriously its that good an organization ?? Hiring - You are forced to hire female candidate at any cost. Statement from mgmt. - If you are hiring a guy, then he needs to be Rockstar. supper talented. Then only we will approve offer. If a girl, then we are fine with average or below average. Offer approval for a guy will go through lot of troubles. - Managers are expected to be intelligent enough to know who is going to leave in near time. When a person from my team resigned, Words from mgmt. - you are not intelligent enough to understand that this person could resign. They always need a scapegoat for any bad thing that happens. - There are some apps installed in the machines which calculates your login time, productivity time and most importantly your coding score. So if you were working on some tool or some POC or some new designing/architecture where less coding required, your score will go down. Your manager will be asked why the coding score getting down. You and your manager will be having very hard time explaining things. Think for normal use case where we have less work - you will be worried this time as well because your coding score is going down. Appraisal/promotion decisions are directly taken on these scores. Team effectiveness is judged on the average time team is logged in. Managers will be pressurized that why their team's login-logout time is so less. No one will tell about these tools in HR induction. - You will definitely loose your self esteem by working in this organization. I wasted 2 fruitful years of my life working in this organization. They don't have any probation period as well. From day1 your NP is 3 months. - I have been asked to purchase an iphone on my own because Citi's email can be opened through that phone only. I was told that you should buy an iphone so that you can look and respond to the emails by checking quickly when you are off work (weekends, holidays and vacations). So basically in order to work during my off time I have to purchase an iphone on my own. So many things we can extract from this statement to understand the culture. - Not a SINGLE project/bu party. no outdoor activities at all. New joiners - I would say stay away at any cost please. Believe me. This is my experience in a specific BU and specific team. I am not sure about other BU's and teams. I am just sharing my experience.

1.0
Feb 27, 2016

Citi Pune

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Better salary than other service based companies.. if you are fortunate enough and good negotiator.

Cons

If you are planning to join Citi India (CSIL) and trying to collect information, I would recommend to please read it till end, although it might be bit lengthy. First thing, what is CSIL. Its one of the two legal entities of Citicorp in India (Citibank & CSIL). The idea of forming this company was plain and simple – Cost Saving. As Citi had outsourced most of its IT business to other IT service companies, So by cost perspective it made sense to top management that what if we start our own IT service firm in a low cost country like India and in-source some of the IT business back to Citi. So, CSIL was formed as a regular IT service organization which will hire IT people, get the project, deliver it to Citi and get paid by Citi by number of hours their employee spent on execution of that task..like any other service company. Make sense to save cost, but does everyone in Citi on-boarded by this idea... HELL NO. People sitting in US at middle management has their own agenda, Vendors who are in Citi for years and suppose to handover their tasks has their own agenda, people sitting here in CSIL has their own and this has started a mess rather than a place to work. Let me explain why. Most of the Citi IT employees in US are Indian. They are there for many years and when they started to realize that if things will be started getting delivered from India, ultimately they will be asked to go back. Whats the point of paying a manager in US when his entire or most of the team is in India. This started a triangular fight for survival. Companies which are handling Citi's IT for long are not happily handover their task to CSIL for obvious reasons, IT managers sitting in US are supporting them so that they can see CSIL fail and stay put in US. They started recruiting those vendor resources on Citi's payroll in US and building a team there to justify that some critical tasks are being handled by Citi Employees and the management at CSIL India is fighting to get projects from Citi and show them as delivered to prove their significance. So, when you join CSIL, first you have to fight for good work that is not at all there. Only substandard work that Citi employees in US or their vendors doesn't want to do, comes to CSIL. So after 8-10 years if you was asked to do work that is not going to add anything in your career, its not logical to do just for money. Obviously CSIL is paying better then Indian IT service companies because they are replacing people sitting in US by CSIL so even if they are paying little bit extra, its just a fraction of US pay. But the main thing is 'work and learning' and only thing you can learn is office politics to get some relevant work so that at the end of year you have to show something. The worst nightmare (which is the most of the case in CSIL) is if your manager is sitting in US. Since he/she doesn't like the idea of CSIL for the reason I explained above, he might schedule a call at mid-night. If top management is forcing vendors to handover some important project to CSIL, your call might be scheduled at their post lunch hours, so you have to be awake till 2 AM and see call gets canceled at 1.50 AM. Everything is happening here because everyone is trying to survive and save their jobs. You might get a designation which might be so fascinating like AVP or VP but get ready to be dictated by these vendor resources because most of them are in Citi for 8-10 years and god know what they are doing for so long in US. Now the management of CSIL, they are already amused and just trying to save their highly paid jobs. In every management call, they have to listen that this center is not performing, attrition rate is always around 30%, so why should not close this center or sell it to some other IT service provider. With the reputation CSIL is building, it will not take long that either CSIL or some of the units that are not performing will be sold off. And for this reason, it seems they are not investing much on this center. Very simple things, like there are no automated HR software..even if you have to declare your investments, it will be just in a homemade portal and after declaring you can't view it ever again!!! People are sitting in meeting rooms as the place is cramped etc etc. Obviously, CSIL is just an experiment and if you are going to join it, please be ready to be a part of that experiment. There are lots of other things. If you know anyone there, just pickup the phone and ask how bad it is. And even after going through this review, you are going to join Citi for any reason – Welcome to the mess and please be sure to get an exit plan ready :).

1.0
Oct 15, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Money- if you dont mind being a slave; u will get a good price for yourself. Work from home- depends on your managers approval. Senior management is very transparent.

Cons

HR Lacks IQ and is very slow in responding, sometimes they wont bother to reply to your email unless you escalate them. Not enough 4 wheeler parking, its reserved only for seniors. Bays, desks and even chairs are of pathetic quality. Expect back pain within a month. Transport is pathetic.

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