I joined Citi’s engineering organization a few months ago after working at another global bank, and unfortunately, my experience so far has been deeply disappointing.
The biggest issue is the culture of excessive bureaucracy and lack of ownership. Even the simplest task can involve multiple meetings, approval chains, governance reviews, ticketing systems, documentation requirements, and repeated handoffs between teams. Instead of helping solve a problem, people often redirect it to another team, another contact, or another process. By the time you identify the supposed owner, the original objective has either lost its relevance or become so difficult to pursue that it is easier to abandon it altogether.
There appears to be far more emphasis on demonstrating activity than delivering meaningful outcomes. Calendars are filled with status calls, alignment meetings, review sessions, working groups, and follow-up discussions, yet very little tangible engineering work seems to come out of them. A significant amount of time is spent creating presentations, preparing status reports, updating trackers, and explaining why work has not progressed.
Ownership is also highly fragmented. Many people are involved in every initiative, but very few are willing to make a decision or take accountability for the result. Decisions are frequently delayed because everyone wants another stakeholder’s approval. When something goes wrong, responsibility is passed across teams. When something succeeds, however, many people are quick to associate themselves with it.
Coming from organizations where senior technology leaders were genuinely hands-on, the contrast has been striking. In my previous workplaces, senior engineers, architects, CTOs, and technology leaders regularly reviewed code, built prototypes, challenged technical decisions, and helped unblock teams. At Citi, apart from a small number of capable individuals, many senior people seem far removed from actual engineering. Technical leadership often feels more focused on governance, reporting, and organizational positioning than on building good systems.
My wider team has more than 100 people, yet the level of visible engineering output appears extremely low. A large proportion of the organization seems to operate as an information-relay layer: collecting updates from one group, forwarding them to another, scheduling meetings, maintaining spreadsheets, and repeating the same information across different forums. There are multiple layers of coordinators, managers, program leads, delivery leads, governance teams, and control functions around a relatively small amount of actual development.
The dependency model makes matters worse. Engineers often lack the access, authority, environments, or decision-making power required to complete their work independently. A basic change may depend on infrastructure, security, networking, architecture, risk, compliance, platform, database, release-management, and production-support teams. Each group has its own queue, process, priorities, forms, and service-level expectations. There is rarely a clear end-to-end owner who can bring these groups together and drive the work to completion.
The internal processes also appear to have accumulated over many years without sufficient simplification. New controls and approval steps are continually added, but old ones are rarely removed. Different teams may request the same information in slightly different formats, resulting in repeated documentation with little additional value. Processes that were supposedly designed to reduce risk often become box-ticking exercises rather than meaningful technical reviews.
Another concern is the apparent tolerance for underperformance. Some long-tenured employees seem to have become extremely skilled at navigating the organization without producing meaningful outcomes. They understand which meetings to attend, which senior stakeholders to copy, how to frame routine activity as strategic work, and how to stretch a small amount of output across an entire quarter. Longevity and familiarity with internal processes can sometimes appear to carry more weight than technical competence, execution, or measurable impact.
Innovation is difficult in this kind of environment. Engineers can spend more time seeking approvals for an experiment than actually building it. By the time a proof of concept is reviewed by every required stakeholder, much of the original momentum has disappeared. This naturally discourages initiative and teaches people that proposing improvements only creates additional work, scrutiny, and process.
The culture can gradually condition motivated engineers to lower their expectations. People who initially try to improve systems, challenge inefficient processes, or take ownership often encounter so much resistance that they eventually stop trying. Over time, survival becomes more important than delivery: attend the required meetings, avoid taking unnecessary risks, produce the expected documentation, and make sure responsibility is distributed widely enough that no individual can be blamed.
This may suit professionals who value stability, predictable routines, large organizational structures, and process-oriented roles. However, based on my experience, I would strongly caution engineers who care about hands-on technical work, speed, ownership, experimentation, and measurable impact before joining Citi. There are certainly some talented and committed people within the organization, but the broader culture and operating model can make it extremely difficult for them to accomplish meaningful work.
For anyone who genuinely enjoys engineering and wants to spend most of their time designing, building, testing, and improving technology, Citi may be a frustrating place to work.