Appreciate the effort to send out surveys to show how difficult this place is to get anything done, but history has shown that people here who complain about the insanity are considered “bad attitude “ and given the axe in the next round of layoffs.
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Fiserv's cybersecurity department is run by people who get off on exercising power. I can almost guarantee certain CRM directors probably cost >$2m/yr in the extra needless work they generate. I work somewhere else now where security is as critical, and the focus is on actual exploitability and shipping remediations quickly, even if that means accepting less exploitable vulns. That kind of pragmatism isn't possible at Fiserv because the culture drives away people who think critically. And don't let anyone gaslight you into thinking any of Fiserv's way of being is normal, the bureaucracy and culture are anything but.
The cyber team will block a release of cyber fixes because the scanning software updated and found a minor finding. The customers are vulnerable for longer because the cyber team does not think.
@r1 You sound like you might be on the Cyber Team. I’m no expert in that space, but I can say you all are a pain to work with and seem to go out of your way to not even try to understand the rest of the company and just throw mandates around. I’m not saying those mandates are right or wrong, but the interactions I’ve had with Cyber are typical high friction and almost always something the Cyber Team could have helped resolve much faster IF they wanted to.
You can be critical and polite. Most people complaining about the survey either didn’t bother to read that it isn’t anonymous or can’t comprehend how to formulate a sentence without looking like a d-mba$$.
@fp Please enlighten the Cyber Team then…the floor is yours
@OP Objectively stating problems can put your name on a layoff list. Especially stating that the team is too understaffed or that AI is actually making the system worse. Service Now is painful to use after AI was injected into it
JMo
@f9 can’t agree more. None of the “Cyber Expert” I’ve interacted with understand what is cyber risk. All they do is run a scan and say “here is the findings and now fix it”. I don’t care what the risk is as long as the tool says there is a finding.
@bd I think he’s a JD neither Vance nor Daniels
Somehow every DX survey the main complaints are cybersecurity aka the schizophrenic department and procurement, yet every single quarter nothing changes. In fact, in the way of cyber, it gets worse actually! It must be so easy to be head of cyber if your mentality is "i can't die if I don't leave the house." Zero nuance to the way they think, an absolute hindrance. Not one soul I've interacted with has a fundamental understanding of basic engineering and with the widespread adoption of AI, they're all experts because they have a pocket yes man to tell the unqualified AppSec expert that having the word "credit card" anywhere in the code base(it's an icon with credit card in the name) is in fact a cyber risk.
@ar So leadership wants to be fluffed with no real feedback, gotcha.
It’s almost like five years of terrible leadership might make people vent some emotions, is sticking feet in our mouths are the least of the internal issues that apparently we are just supposed to gloss over to protect the egos of failing leaders, gotcha.
@ar You were one of the very few people I had trust in when I was there.
@ac Same. I’ll never not be 100% honest.
@ar Who is J?
J here. :)
Someone told me this was being discussed… so came over to answer… I like to think I am approachable, you can just ask me via Teams too if ya want. Since main question was “is it anonymous?” … it absolutely is NOT. You go read about the DX methodology and the SPACE framework and now DX Core research which the survey is based on.
While this is the quarterly developer experience (DX) survey… it really is about deploying our tech, so ALL of Development, Infrastructure, and Cyber folks are asked to join. This is NOT the Corporate wide Your Voice survey, nor affiliated with that.
I run the survey to make sure my org is focusing on what we can to help folks in all technology teams with anything we can. The survey does cover more aspects than just areas my teams can help with though. So everyone can use the results to make their teams or larger orgs better too.
The comments are definitely NOT anonymous. Your name is there for everyone to see after the survey closes, so I certainly recommend keeping your comments to the facts and logic of what you want to say, and less emotion. Not only will your management chain see them, so can everyone else… you can also reply to folk’s comments to compare how things are working with different ideas of what works or doesn’t or the like.
Again, everyone has access to the results. Your specific 1-5 (and N/A) votes aren’t publicly attributed to you, but they are grouped down to a small group under a manager, think it it “aggregates up higher” if there are less than 3 or 5 responses for that manager.
And for the record, if I really wanted to, pretty sure we can pull out specific numerical votes by a person. I have no desire to do that, nor can I think of a reason why anyone would be interested in those: the comments are where I imagine folks would put their foot in their mouth, and that has your name right there.
You can mark some of the comments for “Team Only” which would be if for whatever reason you didn’t want everyone else who took the survey to be able to see them. In those cases, still has your name there for your direct peers and your reporting chain.
Can’t think of anything else, but happy to answer questions about the survey, but I don’t read here… so prefer just a reach out via Teams or Email.
I know the questions and this thread has more connotations beyond what I answered. I am not addressing any of that. I’d say the same thing I say to my own org and would say in person, if you aren’t happy, you should try and find a new role elsewhere.
Historically you could take the survey and mark everything "N/A". That way you get marked as participating in the survey, but do not get included in the results of the survey. It is the safest strategy for staying employed.
So the survey is "anonymous" to the point that it won't have your name on it. BUT its easy for us to figure out who gave the bad reviews based on other factors .... like location. If you have 1 or 2 people in NJ and the rest of the team in GA... and you get a terrible score in any field you can see the data by location and make a pretty educated guess who your problem child is.
- The more you know!*
FWIW I’ve trashed our leadership on every survey put in front of me and I’m somehow still around.