The culture is serious and professional in the office yet relaxed at lunch. Hierarchy is not critically important and opinions are always heard and respected because everyone is intelligent. Diversity is great as there are people from everywhere, and everyone seems to be tolerant as discrimination of any kind is strongly looked down upon.

If you wanna be successful, expect to work at least 12 hours a day. If you survive 5 years than you could be raking in $400k+ annually. You will succeed as long as you are not a slacker.

Morgan Stanley is clearly a world-class financial services firm. There is a great deal of diversity and dress code is very professional. There is definitely opportunity working within the firm.

The firm is pretty diverse on the whole and they seem to respect that diversity of cultures.

I work at a front office IT position and began to make $80k plus $10k signing bonus.

You can make a lot of money but be ready for the firm to take most of it away from you!

The objective of the firm is to extract as much money from its clients as possible and is continually developing new methods for extracting money from new places! But they're really in trouble once the clients catch on and go somewhere else.

The working environment can be very stressful because you are expected to always be on call.

The company is trying to make a lot of noise about improving it's company culture, but because of a lack of communication with its employees, this is mostly false.

The compensation is good but the main concern is that management has created a culture that loses clients and revenue from the firm so no once can operate about their compensation potential.

Most people are smart, but are also arrogant and cocky. It's the typical snooty WASP environment and you need to play the game right in order to succeed.

Dress code is casual, but some of the older workers show up in completely professional attire in ties.

Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management is good if you are the right person for it. Most hires are young mba's but it's difficult to fit in when most clients trust their money to the 40-50yr old white male who enjoys playing golf at the country club. It is what it is.

Diversity is good if you consider the fact that diversity means many varieties of white males, if you are a white male and you get as much money from clients as possible you will advance far.

If you have a job with no path or a poor Manager, trying to find other positions is also impossible - since your current Management has to be bought into wanting you to move on.

They desparately need a system like P&G where each Manager is accountible for the upward movement of their staff, and only when their staff are ready for advancement can they advance. Managers keep people in roles longer than they should to further their own ends, even if those people are better suited moving onto a new challenge.

The company's sole asset is its intellectual captial and its People. Yet, the Chief Learning Officer changes every year. It's a revolving door. For some reason, there is not a focus on it or no one stays. This makes it very hard for Learning leadership to implement any kind of long-term vision around people development, career pathing or their performance measurement process - which changes every year. Once they even put an Investment Banker in the CLO role who had no organizational development or learning experience.

As a result, each division does its own thing in terms of learning platform, processes and resources.

If anything tells you about compensation, see CEO Gorman's latest quotes from Bloomberg http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-25/morgan-stanley-ceo-says-workers-complaining-of-pay-cuts-need-new-attitudes.html

If you don't like your pay, leave. Nice attitude. They hire you at flat or equal base comp, and the promise of a bonus as a significant part of total compensation. You are even guaranteed a range your first partial year. It never happens agian. 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, the same story. We're sorry. All of the attend of the crash on high paying executive salaries and the fortunes trades and investment bankers make funnels down to tech, ops and support people who also get screwed, and often rely on their bonus comp to pay their mortgages, escalating commuting costs or paying for their kid's education or saving for their own retirement.

Management used bonus comp as a way to get you in the door, and then after that, they reposition it as "gravy" you cannot and should not be counted on. Quite a bit of bait and switch.

Salary is based upon 30-40% of all your commissions.

The amount of hours you put in can be good or brutal. It mostly depends on which group you are in, I worked as a summer intern and I worked roughly 80-100 hours a week.

The diversity of the firm was average, but I really think they should make an effort to get more women in mid to upper level management.

Opportunity for advancement is mostly limited by hiring senior managers from outside the company.

Advancement seems to be more and more based on who you know instead of your performance.

There were some fair opportunities for advancement, I didn't feel like it was necessary for one to go to business school to become an associate. However, there isn't much international opportunity until after your 3rd year analyst role.