I started six months ago and it's been a nightmare. I joined because I know people who used to work here years ago and all they had were words of praise for the company. Now I'm thinking that either they like me much less than I thought and lied to me or things have changed drastically since they worked here. Which one is it?
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The actual inflection point was late JY. As JY ran out of gas, notice that the heads of Finance, Legal, Audit and Risk all left within months of each other. They were replaced with soulless politicians whose ambitions fed J's quest to make money, look good, and escape before the intellectual bankruptcy bills came due. JY was a financial wh-z who knew exactly what "buying" a KKR asset meant, and who left while the leaving was good. If FB is indeed a scorpion, my guess is that he is only playing the bad hand he was dealt.
I started back in the early 2000's. Even then, the interview process was more a series of warnings that it was to find out about me, basically saying the hours were often long and tedious, but you could do fine if you were willing to put in the work. These were still the suit and tie days for non client facing personnel.
The company evolved over the years, grew, acquired other BU's and ultimately started to relax as those cultures became interwoven. It was an okay place to work. The 2010's saw the company embrace remote work, I mean it's a cost effective strategy with the right people, and offices were flattened. The culture was pretty okay, even into JY's last years.
When OFD "merged" with OFS (and I use that term loosely as OFS literally bought them off the scrap heap) it started to slide. Gradual at first, and then delayed by the pandemic, but in 2019 the writing was on the wall.
It still baffles me how a leadership team that drove one company into the ground was able to get scooped up by a solid organization and then somehow...take it over so they could repeat their failed strategies on a larger company with the same results. Fiserv was big enough to absorb some of that shock with minimal ripples, but the last 12-18 months have been like watching a slow motion train wreck.
I left a couple of months ago and have already been pinged by recruiters to return. No freaking way I'd walk back into that mess. Job searches don't always happen fast but my advice.....start/keep looking. One thing I've heard over and over from peers who left is that they are shocked by what a "normal" culture feels like once they move on.
Before the losers from First Data took over, yes it was actually a decent place to work
The little worker bees do not have much to look forward to…
It was decent and you could make a nice profit on the stock. Then the 1st data clowns showed up and ran everyone off starting with the most experienced. This is really just a financial exercise for them to drain the $$$ from the company and sell it. They have no skills to build anything
The 90s were great. Less so in the 2000s then disastrous summers once the evil got inside.
if this is clint, sorry i didn't warn you
Been here over 30 years, and what was once a place I was happy and proud to work for, has become an unrecognizable sham of its former self. The description of Sears is pretty spot on. I’m out the first chance I get.
I used to love my company and my job. It wasn’t perfect but JY had a way of motivating me like FB never has. I trusted him as a leader and that he had the clients and employees best interest at heart. That all changed in 2019-2020 when the merger occurred. Since then it has become a living nightmare to work here.
It was fine, never perfect, but certainly worth it if you had a direct manager that was on your side instead of just telling you to do whatever hair-brained idea those above him/her came up with. Slowly, those leaders left out of frustration or had their ability to compromise removed as Sr. Leadership grew frustrated that people wouldn’t just get in line and take reductions to their quality of life in order for the company to be more profitable. (See the first attempt at RTO in 2021)
More and more people with the ability to move on from Fiserv left and were replaced by cheaper, less knowledgeable alternatives. Problem resolution disappeared and was replaced by patching things up to the point where you can move on to the next disaster, knowing the problem that happened would return.
When I left, things had gotten to the point where teams simply could not work together. The teams with people that had knowledge and wanted to find solutions would get into meetings or on bridges with teams that needed to help. Either the sole person on these other teams that knew what to do wasn’t available, nobody wanted to help, or nobody on the team had any idea what you were asking because the people with knowledge left a month ago. There were meetings with supposed SMEs where you would ask the same question multiple times because they didn’t understand the question. Then when they finally got it, they’d tell you someone else that wasn’t in the meeting would know that. Then you would talk to that person, and they’d have no idea what you are talking about. When you finally did get an answer, it was a vague half-answer that sometimes just left you with more questions. Before, it might take a while to find the right person, but eventually you would get a solid, confident, no doubt answer. Now, you can be pretty confident the answers you get aren’t even true.
The knowledge drain is pretty much unrecoverable at this point and the leadership aware of this are all just trying to get by until they can get their next resume-stuffing position and move on. I’m sure the shambling corpse of Fiserv will keep trudging along because Wall Street is full of gambling addicts that don’t actually know what businesses do. Eventually, there will be no value left to drain from it and it will be broken up and sold off for parts.
As this gets worse, the place is going to start looking like K-Mart and Sears as those places started to fall into disrepair. You would walk in and see half empty shelves and uninterested, underpaid staff having no idea what they were even supposed to be doing. And you’d wonder, “Why/How is this place event still open?” That’s where Fiserv is headed, just the white collar/office job version of that.
I have been with Fiserv for well over 10 years. It has gotten really rough. I used to love it here and wanted to stay long enough to retire now it feels like any day could be my last.
Not just drastically, it has become traumatic under FB's leadership. Do not make the mistake of trusting senior leaders here any more.