Treats its highly educated employees like dirt ... and Fidelity doesn't even have the excuse of needing to respond to quarterly pressure from shareholders, since they are not publicly owned. The only people company managers have to report to are the Johnson family, particularly Ned and his daughter Abigail, who are the 35th and 16th richest Americans, respectively. Fidelity engages in such dubious scams as keeping 24 cattle on a Texas ranch so as to obtain an agricultural exemption that reduces their state tax bill by 99.78%, while also buying front-page newswriters for the Boston Globe to promote their latest free-checking accounts, but Fidelity's most outrageous corporate policy is its treatment of its employees. My wife used to work there, and left before the really crazy stuff began to happen: at that time, her boss and dozens of other workers were told that they needed to relocate from Boston to some place in North Carolina, in order to keep their jobs. So, at the beginning of this summer, all these people picked up spouses and kids and moved down south. Guess where they are now? In North Carolina ... but unemployed. Fidelity had the bright idea of moving these dozens (perhaps even hundreds) of employees out of Boston, then laying them off a couple of months after getting there. Nice guys, huh? I know that financial services is a tough business now--Charles Schwab has for example moved people from San Francisco to Phoenix, but they haven't gotten laid off, and at least it's Phoenix and not some podunk ex-company town that their employees are stuck in ... Crappy company all around.