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Graduated two years ago, I've been working at Amazon Web Services for the last year and a half. For a number of reasons my performance has gone down (lack of interest, mental problems) and I was considering leaving at about the same time that I was informed that my manager wanted to work with me to improve my performance. Since then, I have been actively looking for another job (I know that sounds harsh, but I wasn't exactly having a fun time at my current job anyway). One of the better jobs is a Scala tooling / developer / development productivity platform improvement project for Morgan Stanley in New York. Now I love Scala and the people on the team seem to know what the f they are doing (I had questions on Java classloader and byte code and advanced Scala features) - like this seems to be one of the better teams at JP Morgan. And potentially they might be able to pay well (the recruiter said that the manager would be willing to pay $215k in a heartbeat although there would be resistance from the HR department). That being said, I am concerned about a few things.
One of the coding interviews they threw at me was very easy. Like it worries me that they have such easy coding interviews compared to say the big tech companies because that suggests to me that they're not filtering out a lot of the less intelligent people that places like say Google are filtering out. Second, when I said that I couldn't install Skype and asked to use Google Hangouts, they said that Google Hangouts wasn't on the approved list and that they couldn't use it. The fact that they have an "approved list" and strict firewall kind of worries me because at Amazon Web Services I could go on literally any website and the only caveat was that I couldn't install stuff except through Amazon's secure built-in installer thing that comes on every laptop. But at Amazon I could literally go on any site and the system wouldn't block it.
Also, the culture difference between a place like Amazon and a place like Morgan Stanley is a thing of concern. Can anyone with personal experience elaborate on the difference? Like on my team people wear jeans and funny shirts that say things like "I work on computers" with a picture of a cat napping on a computer. Another guy wears a shirt with ninjas fighting a dinosaur. One girl wears jean shorts and flip flops and a button down shirt (she has a thick Cali girl accent with a vocal fry). How is the culture and stuff different between a place like say Amazon Web Services and a place like Morgan Stanley? Also, can anyone brace me for the sort of corporate red tape bullshit that I might run into at a financial institution? Also the hours - at Amazon I never worked more than 8 hours a day (less on a Friday). Can anyone elaborate on the hours that bank employees have to work?
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Side note: I started interviewing for Google and they fast-tracked my application (that being said, it can still take well over a month to get through the whole interview process). Like they skipped the initial technical phone screen. Should I wait, maybe review my CS fundamentals and maybe try and see if I can get an offer from Google? Or maybe just take the Morgan Stanley job but go through the Google interview process anyway as a backup so that if I pass at least Google has me in their database.
