Considering taking a job at Suncorp? You need to think again, let me tell you.

I have a maths/coding background and I'd like to give an employee review of Suncorp, after having worked there in their risk modelling department for over 18 months. I was brought in on a salary that was completely inappropriate for the role, and spent the whole time going round and round in circles unable to get any work done because completely incompetent managers kept fighting with me. Then I was told to get lost because they didn’t feel they needed my particular skills anymore. Over 2 years after leaving, I'm still very angry about what they did to me. Before I quit, I discussed my experience with another technical member of staff who had extensive experience in the financial services industry. This is what he said:

"This is the worst place I've ever worked. The way they treat people. Fighting with people to get things done."

He quit some time after I did. My direct manager (who was a good guy) quit a few months before I did. He just couldn't take the way he was being treated any more. I heard word that several more of the technical staff have since quit as well.

But Let me start my review at the beginning.

When I joined Suncorp, I was offered an amount that seemed very low for someone of my skills and abilities. But I hadn't worked in finance before, and was trying to transition careers, and I didn't know the exact nature of the role. Maybe it was an entry level role, and maybe there would be a learning curve? In any case, the HR representative assured me that the salary review process was only 6 months away, so I could renegotiate my salary after 6 months.

As soon as I got into the role, I realised that this wasn't an entry level position at all, but a senior position managing, by an order of magnitude, the most complex financial model in the entire bank. It required knowledge of complex mathematics and statistics. My salary was easily $20,000 below what the market pays in this kind of role, and one of the lowest on the floor, among people who worked with far simpler models. And not only was there no learning curve, but I was up and running so fast it shocked my predecessor, who had years of previous experience in this kind of modelling. "It took me 4 months to understand what the model was doing!" he told me, after I mastered the model in my first 1-2 weeks and re-wrote the code from scratch in a much more organised form (the existing code was almost impossible to follow).

I went on to discover multiple critical errors in the model methodology that everyone else had missed - even external consultants. In one case, they had been using the wrong data category from the external data provider to fit their risk distribution to. In another case, there was an error with their data blending code which made their capital requirement about 30 million dollars higher than it needed to be. I spent over an hour on a conference call with the industry expert, who had validated our model (and who charged a lot of money), until he finally understood that I was right and there was an error in the model.

When I joined Suncorp, the model took 5 and a half hours to run. This was a big problem, because any time we needed to run the model we had to wait a whole day for the result. Furthermore, when we needed to do sensitivity testing for the model (running the model many times to test how sensitive it is to variation in inputs), it took weeks. By rewriting part of the code in c++ and implementing some clever mathematical tricks to reduce the number of computations required, I got the model run time down to 30 minutes. This increased our efficiency tremendously and meant sensitivity testing could now be completed in a day, instead of taking weeks.

Now, you'll remember that my salary was about $20,000 below the market. But not to worry, because I could renegotiate my salary after 6 months, right? Wrong. At the 6 month mark I raised with management that my salary was clearly completely inappropriate for this sort of role, and completely inconsistent with the phenomenal job I had been doing. And since we were now at the 6 month mark, it was time for the promised salary adjustment. Their response was that no, my salary would not be adjusted until the 1 year mark at the salary review process. It turns out that the HR representative lied to me when she said the review process was only 6 months away. I had in fact joined about one month after the completion of the last review process, so it was almost a full year until the next one.

In the next six months, I found another critical error in the model. It was concerning the frequencies (number of simulated losses generated per year). I realised that the input frequencies in the model needed to be at least 10, as there was asymptotic behaviour near zero which we needed to avoid. It was again causing our required capital amount to be tens of millions of dollars higher than it needed to be. One of our business lines was being allocated TWICE as much capital as it should have been because of the error. You'd think they'd be impressed and appreciative that I have discovered that for years, their model had been requiring twice as much capital as was really necessary for that business line, wouldn't you? But I never got so much as a thanks for that discovery. Suncorp management not only had no appreciation for my discovery, they DECLINED TO ALLOW ME TO FIX IT. At the committee there were two managers presiding over whether my change should be implemented, neither of which had the expertise to even understand how the model worked. "Nah, I don't think we wanna do that" one of them said. Let's call this guy "manager 1". "It's not an error. The model's just being conservative", the other added. So if a number is twice as high as I should be, it’s good because it just means the model is just being conservative? It's hard to say whether they had an underlying agenda or are really that daft.

What was breathtaking was that not only did manager 1 prevent me from fixing all frequencies above 10, he actually started trying to push his own idea that we reduce all frequencies to 1 - AFTER I told him they needed to be at least 10! This would have doubled capital due to the asymptotic problem! It was truly breathtaking how he seemed quite determined to do exactly what I told him we needed to avoid. If I had to explain his behaviour, I'd say he wanted a frequency of 1 he didn't know how to model a frequency of more than 1, and wanted to get rid of me and try to do the calculation himself in a spreadsheet.

Later on, the regulator told the bank that they thought our model was too complicated. Thus, the bank wished to simplify the model. I got to work. In one morning, I was able to strip out 80% of the mathematical complexity in the model, and not only that, the new simplified model produced exactly the same output as the old one within simulation error. And I had everything done by lunchtime. I began preparing a document about the simplifications to take to the committee. How did manager 1 react? Did he declare that I needed to be rewarded for this spectacular achievement? No - the document I was preparing to take to the committee meeting next week about my model simplifications was tossed in the trash. "I just don't feel it gets us where we want to be", he declared. At the committee meeting, he announced his own idea to the business, an idea which he declined to run by me first, despite me being the expert on the topic. He wanted to replace the model with a square-root-rule calculation in a spreadsheet - an idea that was completely incorrect. Of course, the reason he didn't mention it to me before the meeting is because he quite deliberately wished to undermine me. After the meeting, I sent him an email explaining that the square root rule only works for normally distributed losses, and as we were modelling heavy-tailed losses, it simply couldn't be used. Heavy tailed losses can only be modelled using simulation which requires computer code - they cannot be calculated using a high school algebra formula in a spreadsheet.

Did this manager listen to me when I told him it wasn't possible to model heavy tailed loss distributions in a spreadsheet? Nope - he spent the next THREE MONTHS running in circles like a dog chasing its tail trying to do what I told him couldn't be done. When he finally gave up he said "I think we'll use your model as the *main* model", even at this point refusing to admit that he had wasted months of time and produced nothing, and I had been right all along.

What sort of a manager blocks the team expert from presenting their idea at the committee, and then announces their own idea that they have never run by the expert? At Suncorp, competent people are despised. They are obstructed and undermined at every opportunity. This is because the dopey, arrogant management always have stupid, unworkable agendas, and competent people are always standing in their way telling them they can't do it that way. I remember once we were in a meeting and people were asking how many months it would take to simplify the model, and whether we had the resources to do it. The manager made no mention of the fact that I had completed the work three months ago, in one morning before lunch.

Suncorp management have absolutely no interest whatsoever in the validity of the numbers their models produce. All they care about is whether the number serves their political agendas. For competent people with integrity and standards, this makes working at Suncorp intolerable and harmful to your mental health.

Over the Christmas period, everyone was forced to take 2 weeks of their annual 4 weeks leave whether they wanted to or not. This sucks because you can’t go anywhere over Christmas because it’s too expensive and that just leaves you with effectively 2 weeks holiday per year. One guy who just joined before Christmas was forced to go into negative holiday. This is one of management’s great cost cutting ideas to force people to waste half their holiday over the Christmas period.

Now, let's come back to my salary. We were now at the one year mark, where performance and salaries are reviewed. Suncorp have a review system where for each attribute you are either failing to meet, meeting, or exceeding expectations. However, it was very obvious that people's direct managers were strongly discouraged from giving anyone exceeding because management didn't want to have to give anyone a raise. The whole process is entirely dishonest. However, seeing that I was brought in on a salary about $20,000 below the market, and had displayed some truly exception abilities in the role, you'd think there would be a substantial increase at this point, right? Wrong. Can you guess what actually happened? They gave me NOTHING. Not even a small increase. My direct manager, who was one of the few good people at Suncorp, was so disgusted he used the meeting where we were supposed to discuss the results of the performance review to instruct me to leave Suncorp as soon as possible. He quit a few months later himself. After one year working for these bastards on a salary $20,000 below the market, they tried to leave me on that salary for another year. Obviously, there was no way I was going to tolerate this. I soon decided to raise with management the issue of my completely inappropriate salary. Manager 1 dismissed me instantly. "We can't consider salaries until the next annual review process", I was told. I immediately went over that guy's head his manager, manager 2. I'd now been on a salary about $20,000 below the market for over a year, there was no f**king way I was going to wait another year.

Manager 2 claimed to be busy and it was many weeks until he met with me. At the meeting, I pointed out that my salary was far below what other people on the floor were earning. "They came in when we needed someone! We can't bring their salaries down, and we're trying to cut costs!" manager 2 said. I pointed out that my salary was tens of thousands of dollars below the market. "Maybe we can find someone on pay band 3!" he announced (a pay band even lower than mine). I pointed out that I had reduced the model run time from 5 and a half hours to 30 minutes. He shrugged his shoulders. "The bank has to determine how much it's willing to pay for your skills and abilities" he said dismissively. He suggested I work really hard and ask for extra work, and maybe I would get an increase one day in the future. I inquired as to why I should do that seeing as how my salary was tens of thousands of dollars below the market. He said snidely, "well, that's not how I've approached my career".

He did say he would have HR conduct a review of my salary, because HR maintain industry data about appropriate salaries for different roles, and get back to me soon. Six weeks later, I still hadn't heard from him, so I raised the issue with him again. He admitted that he hadn't bothered to undertake a review. The bank was refusing to conduct such a review, because it was in "cost cutting mode". "In my opinion, your salary is appropriate", he declared, after refusing to take any steps to determine whether my salary was appropriate. Then he said, "The bank has no appetite for an increase at this time. I realise this isn't going to be satisfactory to you, and if that's the case, you should consider other options".

When you apply for a job at Suncorp, their standard procedure is simply to offer you as little as possible, regardless of whether it is remotely appropriate for the role you'll be doing. The time for your salary to be corrected keeps getting moved further and further into the future, until they give up the ruse and admit they're never going to pay you appropriately and you should just f**k off if you don't like it. Management at Suncorp display zero loyalty to their staff and have zero interest in investing in them or developing their careers. There is no such thing as a career at Suncorp - you're just a pig in a pen to be used for the agendas of the management team, and discarded if they don't consider you useful to their immediate politics. If you do ever up working there, don't show them any loyalty, because they will show you absolutely none.

What had happened between then and when I joined was that regulatory changes had come in which meant that this particular model was not high on the agenda of management anymore. Of course, they knew on the day they hired me that these regulatory changes were going to come in. So no doubt it was their plan to discard me all along. They could have simply moved me into another role. There were a lot of modelling roles in the bank, and in fact several people in management positions there who had the same background as I did. But then they would have had to give me a pay increase. Why pay me more when they didn't feel they had any immediate need to? I asked manager 2 whether I could be moved into another role. He said that if a role became available and was advertised on the internet I could "apply" for it, but he refused to take any proactive action whatsoever.

Suncorp's management treat staff like tools to be exploited. When their agenda shifts, and you don't feature in the new agenda, you become like nothing to them. What thanks did I get for fighting with management trying to make sure Suncorp had correct financial models? Paid $20,000 below the market for 18 months and then told to f**k off by these incompetent little weasels. On Suncorp’s Careers website https://www.suncorpgroup.com.au/careers they write, “We’ll give you the support to develop new skills, and the opportunity to challenge yourself, to become your very best.” That’s interesting, because I was told that they didn’t feel they really needed my role anymore, and wouldn’t move me into another role because they were trying to cut costs, so I should just get lost. They also say, “Immerse yourself in a company where your voice is heard”. My voice was utterly ignored, obstructed and disregarded at every opportunity.

Suncorp has a culture of manipulating models to give the numbers that management find most politically convenient. Most of my time was spent running and rerunning models with different inputs and parameters until management got a number that they liked. If the number was too high, we'd go back and fiddle with the model inputs to get the number down. And this is a key point about Suncorp - when all you care about is that the numbers serve your own political agendas, it doesn't matter whether the model methodology makes any sense. Because you're not really intending to use it. The only thing that matters to you is, can I fiddle with the model inputs until the model gives me the number I want? If so, it’s a satisfactory model. They only want to pretend to do risk modelling to the extent they believe is required to fool APRA (the financial regulator). And this gives you some insight into why I was treated the way I was. If you don’t care whether the model methodologies are correct, and simply want to fudge the numbers in a way that serves your political agendas, what use to you are competent people who know how to do valid financial modelling work? They just get in your way while you’re trying to make up numbers. My direct manager commented how odd it was that they often didn’t even include me in email chains about the model – the model I was the expert on. Eventually, they seemed to stop assigning me work altogether and just ignore me, so I just sat around doing nothing. Once, my manager assigned me some work, and his manager soon intervened and took the work away from me and gave it to someone else. Whenever I did do some work, manager 1 would just fight with me and put it in the trash so I was literally prevented from getting any work done anyway. They seemed to obstruct and marginalise me quite deliberately. It's also note worthy that they claimed I couldn't be paid fairly because they were trying to “cut costs”, yet they themselves were paid a lot of money to waste tremendous amounts of time.

A couple of months after my salary discussions with manager 2, they were doing a new risk capital calculation for the superannuation part of the business. I showed them that the model they were using was completely methodologically incorrect, to the point that the numbers it produced were meaningless. What they had done was to estimate a few losses that would occur and then fit a lognormal distribution to it. What this meant was that the standard deviation of the distribution - the most critical parameter - was being determined by how spread out their estimates were. In other words, it was just random nonsense. If they guessed slightly different numbers for the input estimates, the amount of capital we were required to hold to protect against an unexpected loss would double. They seemed to eventually acknowledge the problem, but elected to keep using the model because it had been officially "validated", and if they changed it now they would have to go through the validation process again which is a nuisance. They would also probably have to explain to their superiors why they had been feeding them incorrect numbers for so long. So manager 1 and manager 2 just fiddled with their input estimates for a while until the model gave the same number as last year, and off they went to the board. It’s not very good for the customers of Suncorp’s superannuation business that they’re not bothering to do proper risk calculations to secure their customers against losing their money.

Soon, it was time for the beginning of the next performance review process. At my performance review meeting, manager 1, who had spent over a year fighting with me whenever I pointed out that his work was completely incorrect, accused me of being "too focused on academic accuracy" - while two highly paid idiots took a fake model and completely made up superannuation risk numbers to the board.

Furthermore, manager 1 accused me of having "poor communication" - after utterly disregarding everything I told him. This man, who had fought with me and undermined me at every opportunity refused to admit he had wasted tremendous amounts of time and that I had been right all along. Instead, preferring to place the blame on me by claiming I had "poor communication". Now, I worked for many years in a teaching and public speaking role, and one thing I was always praised for was my unusually good communication and oratory skills. In fact, after I gave a presentation to a room full of people at Suncorp, another member of staff approached me and commented on how well I spoke. This makes me think Suncorp management have a culture of inventing phony criticisms about staff when they don't want to pay them fairly or are trying to force them out for their own political reasons. It’s also likely that they are threatened by competent people. In fact, when I was applying for my next job I was praised for my good communication skills in the interview. You remember that I provided them with a high quality methodologically correct simplified model, in line with what the regulator wanted, and they spent months fighting with me preventing me from moving forward with it. And not only that, but it took be only half a day. What thanks did I get for this? Absolutely none. Told I had “poor communication”.

Suncorp management simply don’t have the competence, the intelligence or the integrity required to run a business.

A few months later, after working at Suncorp for 20 months on a salary $20,000 below the market, I got a job at another bank which came with a 40% pay increase.

On the day I quit, this idiot manager who had spent 12 months fighting with me because he wanted my model to be replaced with a spreadsheet - something which wasn't possible - wanted me to hang around for my 4 weeks of notice rewriting the model in a spreadsheet. What's more, he wanted me to implement it with a FREQUENCY OF 1! Twelve months after I told him frequencies needed to be at least 10 to avoid an asymptotic anomaly at 0, he asked for a frequency of 1! I told him there was no way I was doing that. I left immediately, foregoing 4 weeks’ notice pay but relieving myself of the psychological damage of having to work with these morons for another 4 weeks.

I thought about sending round an email to the whole bank like what I've written here in this review, but decided against it. While it would have been satisfying, after the way they had treated me, I didn't want to give them any advice they could learn from.

Suncorp management believed they could get away with the way they treated me. But the internet changes things. It allows us to spread the word about how they treat us by writing employee reviews like this one on places like reddit, but also on employee review websites like Glassdoor, seek and LinkedIn. I know one guy who moved to Brisbane to work at Suncorp and had to immediately start trying to get out again after moving his family to Brisbane. It's my hope that reviews like this one will help other people avoid what we had to go through.

Perhaps you have arrived at my review because you are thinking of taking a job at Suncorp. What would I say to someone considering a career at Suncorp? I would give them the same advice that Suncorp's own management gave me: "You should consider other options". Take the bank's own advice - consider other options.