Technology Placement Review

I started at UBS on a placement year and have since returned on the grad scheme. I would say that I learnt far more in my year at UBS than I did in any of my years of formal education as a computer scientist. How much of this can be attributed to UBS itself, and how much can be attributed to my manager is debatable, however good companies attract good employees.
The grad program for technology is very well structured, with a year in your "home team" and then two 6 month rotations into other technology divisions, as well as other business areas.

Whilst on placement I was in 2 different teams, both within Asset Managament Technology. The first is the team which I returned to for my grad scheme, which focuses on event driven architecture and interconnectivity between our applications in AM Tech. This was/is a very software engineering focused role, with development in .NET primarily.
The second team was a platforms focused team which primarily focused on improving the dev experience for our colleagues as well as maintaining core cloud infrastructure. This role was much more varied in the tasks I did, but the main areas were devops, cloud and infra management as well as Kubernetes organization.

There is always work to be done, and permanent employees will never complain about you wanting to help. However you have to be proactive. If you reach out to managers and people on your team asking for work then you will be given more than enough to work on. Most managers are more than happy to tailor the work you do to the things you're interested in.

While the base pay is probably one of the lowest for the role in the financial sector, we also receive an extra 18% of the base pay as a benefits package. 10% of this is a pension contribution (most employers will match contributions up to 5% so this effectively saves you 5% of your salary that you otherwise would've put into a pension); the remaining 8% is split across some mandatory items like insurances with the remainder being open for the employee to choose. Personally this means that I have a fully contributed to pension, health, dental and optical insurance as well as a Nuffield Health gym membership, all before touching my base salary.

I think it depends on the person. The job is as good as you make it, you could easily cruise, learn not much and then not be well prepared in the future. But if you put yourself out there, ask for challenging tasks in areas you haven't worked in before etc, then yes you will be well prepared.

Depends on the area massively.

Yes

Yes I would recommend UBS to a friend.