Working at a big bank: "Survival of the well-connected"?

Working at Bank of America Corp. is like struggling to survive in "a vast ocean," one employee wrote in a letter to the Observer this week.

The person, who asked not to be identified, wrote a fictional account from the perspective of a new employee learning the ropes at the Charlotte bank. When the worker notices scores of bankers chatting at a coffee shop, for instance, his mentor tells him getting ahead is all about networking.

"Sounds like survival of the fittest," the worker says.

"Survival of the well-connected is how I will put it," the mentor replies.

A bank spokesman today declined to comment on the employee's account.

The bank worker wrote that that culture results in people ending up in the wrong jobs. It fuels a constant rotation of managers and sometimes prompts leadership to promote "a whole bunch of people ... indiscriminately, because they have no real clue who is doing the job and who is not," only to later demote those employees.

"There is no career plan," he said. "Only a survival plan."

The bank is also constantly reorganizing - about every other month - the employee wrote.

"When someone is put in a new role, they will go through a learning process and become proficient to start performing their job well," he said. "However, it also means that they will make decisions, and there is a risk that they may make mistakes. To prevent them from making mistakes, the bank will proactively reorganize them to new roles before they get up to speed in their current job."

Another gripe involves the bank's pay-for-performance compensation. Instead of evaluating workers' actual performance, managers make guesses mid-year on whether they think employees will achieve their goals by the end of the year, the employee wrote.

“Performance review is something like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy,” he said. “Everyone knows it is not real, but we happily continue telling our children anyway.”

What do you think? Do his complaints ring true? Are his observations typical of most large corporate workplaces, or do they highlight issues distinctive to one of Charlotte’s biggest employers?