Well, if any Dev Leads or HR Managers are reading these comments, you could start by getting rid of the Taleo (or even worse iCIMS) Career search engines from your career microsite. [1][2]
These are awful to use and often require a new profile per company to apply, so applying to a few companies could take hours depending on the work experience required to fill out.
For godsake, enable the quick-apply feature of LinkedIn so your applicants don't have to spend hours labouring over your custom application. [3]
Make recruiting easier for prospective applicants and HR with something like Greenhouse. [4]
Wall Street banks used to be a very good spot for programmers due to:
- big pay, this was often enough to not need more benefits
- what you often got to work on was very interesting
- hours worked tended to be no where near what they were in the hedge fund or startup scene.
They also leaned heavily on credentialism for hiring signals, mostly through where you went to school and secondarily by where you worked before.
Banks have found over the past 10 years that they are no longer a top choice for the best STEM students any more due to a number of factors and hence they have to move down the food chain.
Specifically:
- shrinking size of most of these banks due to decreased profits for the sell side firms
- shrinking pay due above.
- The tech scene and buy side, hedge funds, offer better pay, more interesting work, and much better career upside(moving up in the sell side anymore is cut throat due to shrinking head counts and bonuses).
I know next to nothing of hackerrank but anything that helps opens up the hiring pipeline is a good idea.
As to pay being partially based on bonuses. I mean this isn't going away, and if you don't like it, then you probably won't work in finance at all. Its analogous to startups. You may still get a great base salary, but options will always be a decent portion of your salary.
If you really want to get angry at bonuses. I've had recruiters tell me that many hedge funds have a cut off of $500,000/year bonus for looking for programmers, ie they won't interview programmers who haven't had a bonus of more than $500,000 in a year as they feel it provides one of the better hiring signals. You'd think this would stop them from hiring but there are alot of programmers in the HFT scene who easily pass this bar.
I've had recruiters tell me that many hedge funds have a cut off of $500,000/year bonus for looking for programmers, ie they won't interview programmers who haven't had a bonus of more than $500,000 in a year as they feel it provides one of the better hiring signals.
Sounds as ridiculous as Hollywood casting.
Seems like this would create a "Moneyball"-style opportunity for a hedge fund to actually invest in tech management, hire more objectively, and build a development team that's composed of talent that works well together rather than a random cast of prima donnas who won't get out bed for less than $1MM.
What are some places (except Citadel / Tower / Two Sigma) where one can make half a million in bonus? How does one land and prepare for an interview for such positions?
Also, do you think any of these places might be open to hire a hybrid programmer-quant i.e. someone who isn't as good at math / programming as a typical quant/dev, but is good at connecting the two and working in the middle?
So last year, Furlong, 30, enrolled in a three-month coding boot camp that uses HackerRank, a web platform that trains and grades people on writing computer code. After earning a top ranking for Java developers globally, Furlong was hired by JPMorgan Chase & Co. in December for its two-year technology training program.
So many questions here. If you're doing a bootcamp and scoring among the "top java developers globally" then you're either exceptionally talented, your bootcamp is the most amazing thing in the world, or your sample set of "top java developers" is absolutely terrible.
Or he just earned a "very good" (top 25%) score from HR (by itself, pretty impressive for a 3-month boot camp and zilch experience). But the Bloomberg reporter thought it would sound better if he wrote "top ranking for Java developers globally".
The sample set was those in HackerRank. This guy isn't immediately a senior developer, but he's probably got a bit of talent - the story says he tinkered with motherboards in his spare time, so he's getting some domain knowledge before the bootcamp too.
You can't get from zero to hero in 3 months, but a talented person can go pretty far.
HackerRank are simple exercices which can be done in a few minutes to one hour [online IDE, short single-file code]. It's trivial for anyone who can program, [except the screening tests in limited time with hard (or custom) exercises].
The bootcamp people with good ranking are likely people who started programming a long time ago, but never professionally. It's a given that they must be able to solve simple exercises.
There are lots of exceptionally talented people who aren't software developers and want to be. Three standard deviations above the mean takes you from roughly 100 million working Americans to a hundred thousand. Two standard deviations of being unlucky in having the life-history that gets you to programmer-hood drops you down from 100k to 1000. It's not that surprising, honestly.
Well, HackerRank is a relatively popular website, he spent a 3 month boot camp working in it, and the ranking system looks to be relatively decent at first glance, so I think its reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Edit: HackerRank looks like it measures aptitude more than anything.
Interesting. About a year ago JPM sent me a link to a HackerRank (or something like it) session with a couple of dynamic programming problems in it. It was late at night and I didn't know what to expect. To my surprise the webcam turned on and started recording me (I was shirtless). I panicked and shut down the session expecting JPMorgan to bypass me for quitting the assignment. Lo and behold they still wanted to move forward and I eventually was offered after an onsite. I declined because I had a better offer from another bank and the environment at JPMorgan seemed very worker bee'ish. I would be working in that massive new building right now, 2000 developers at 1 site in Delaware sounds exceptional to me.
Wall Street/banks get a bad rep for a lot of reasons but you can still do "modern" development at some of them and the pay is not bad for the east coast. The project JPMorgan was hiring me for was "modern java" fwiw. I'm currently at a bank doing full stack "modern java" of the JHipster variety essentially (Spring boot, java 8 , angular 2).
Isn't this just a puff piece for hacker-rank?
The banks have been hiring 'coders' for decades now. Most of the technical front office folks have at least the ability to code, if not the time to do it.
Last time I was in an IB, working on synthetic equity desks, everyone there used to code, often tossing it over the fence to IT to get it "productionized" (read: wrapped in red tape, slow down the change rate, etc.).
As many people mentioned below, including etf-to-mark, this really feels like a PR piece for HackerRank, which is a cough YC Company.
As a former Wall Street tech person, I know that JP's story here is overly exaggerated (they're really rigid and still require 3.0 GPA from schools for the two-year tech program they mentioned).
In addition, there are many other companies like HackerRank, and the article fails to mention any of the complaints large corporations and candidates have expressed so far (like you see in the comment section).
Anyone know what happened to Sergey Aleynikov (Goldman Sachs)? That kind of story doesn't help my (already) poor perception of these financial companies.
"Aleynikov was employed for two years, from May 2007 to June 2009, at Goldman at an ultimate salary of $400,000.[4][8] He left to join Teza Technologies, a competing high-frequency trading firm which offered to triple his pay"
The scary part to me is that he spent time in prison, had to use his savings to pay for a lawyer because he couldn't work, and even though acquitted to anybody who doesn't read all the details it looks the same way as not being acquitted.
I can easily imagine that similar situations happen but for people without enough savings to keep going and even then they may not have as high a profile to have their reputation overshadow the headlines.
I feel like I am just shy of tinfoil hat territory but it's not the craziest thing I have ever though of.
I always got the feeling coders/programmers/developers were second class citizens in Wall Street compared to the traders, bankers, quants etc...
Why join at all if Silicon Valley and core tech jobs have competitive pay? What's the justification given equal hours of work/effort put on both sides.
The article doesn't mention crushing bureaucracy, intense regulation, old huge systems, outsourced everything.
Nowadays you're supporting a 10 year old inbred system trying to implement some new regulatory project. No root access, often no access to production, github blocked at the firewall, 4 releases a year, half the staff in India.
Really depends on your team. I work on a small team in a huge investment bank and we are working on new nice-looking apps. I usually don't have to deal with audit, risk management, compliance, regulators, etc. When I do it's usually minimal. We don't have root access but we have full access to production. We release twice a week. I have to deal somewhat with India but it's bearable
So you see a high developer attrition rate, and go, I know, I'll fill it with 3 month code bootcamp graduates?
No wonder their attrition is so high. Apparently they are incapable of observing the fact they are just an awful place to work, and instead of fixing that, they just shovel more developers into their meat grinder.
“This is purely about skill,” said 28-year-old Vivek Ravisankar, a HackerRank co-founder who used to work for Amazon.com Inc. “Most really good programmers learn on their own and just continue to build their skills. Probably the really good programmers are college dropouts.”
As a co-founder of the site, I wonder if he has any data to back that up.
My only take on the article (I'm an EE not CS), is that unless you go to Stanford, you might as well just go boot camp. I guess degrees from all those tier 1 research universities across the country are worthless.
I think a lot of people are going to disagree with you because they _want_ you to be wrong, but my observation (as somebody who got a solid education and a good GPA from a tier 100 university) is that in a lot of places, this is absolutely the case.
and of course that's not true. And anyone experienced has seen people from mit that are just terrible. That degree might help get a cooler first job. That could lead to a better second job, vs say someone from blah state university in a small town, who has a harder time starting. But eventually that person can make it to the big time. I know cause i'm one of those.
I would say degrees work 2-3 years after graduation. After 3-5 years experience becomes more relevant for employers.
Numbers can vary, but based on what I see, after 5-6 years of relevant experience, there's no difference between graduate of Top_20 and of noname college.
There's like a dozen comments saying this is a plug for Hackerrank. Yeah, that's obvious. What's not so obvious is that there are 1000+ YC companies, none of whom get this kind of coverage on Bloomberg even if they bend over backwards. Surely Vivek must be doing something right.
I've given some thought to switch from being on the backend for SaaS companies to working at a hedge fund or bank. I'm just not sure it would be a good cultural fit and it might be hard to make the adjustment from the tech standpoint.
[+] [-] smpetrey|9 years ago|reply
These are awful to use and often require a new profile per company to apply, so applying to a few companies could take hours depending on the work experience required to fill out.
For godsake, enable the quick-apply feature of LinkedIn so your applicants don't have to spend hours labouring over your custom application. [3]
Make recruiting easier for prospective applicants and HR with something like Greenhouse. [4]
[1] https://jpmchase.taleo.net/careersection/2/moresearch.ftl
[2] https://careers-fidelitylife.icims.com/jobs/search?hashed=-4...
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search?keywords=Bank+of+Americ...
[4] https://www.greenhouse.io
[+] [-] chollida1|9 years ago|reply
Wall Street banks used to be a very good spot for programmers due to:
- big pay, this was often enough to not need more benefits
- what you often got to work on was very interesting
- hours worked tended to be no where near what they were in the hedge fund or startup scene.
They also leaned heavily on credentialism for hiring signals, mostly through where you went to school and secondarily by where you worked before.
Banks have found over the past 10 years that they are no longer a top choice for the best STEM students any more due to a number of factors and hence they have to move down the food chain.
Specifically:
- shrinking size of most of these banks due to decreased profits for the sell side firms
- shrinking pay due above.
- The tech scene and buy side, hedge funds, offer better pay, more interesting work, and much better career upside(moving up in the sell side anymore is cut throat due to shrinking head counts and bonuses).
I know next to nothing of hackerrank but anything that helps opens up the hiring pipeline is a good idea.
As to pay being partially based on bonuses. I mean this isn't going away, and if you don't like it, then you probably won't work in finance at all. Its analogous to startups. You may still get a great base salary, but options will always be a decent portion of your salary.
If you really want to get angry at bonuses. I've had recruiters tell me that many hedge funds have a cut off of $500,000/year bonus for looking for programmers, ie they won't interview programmers who haven't had a bonus of more than $500,000 in a year as they feel it provides one of the better hiring signals. You'd think this would stop them from hiring but there are alot of programmers in the HFT scene who easily pass this bar.
[+] [-] pavlov|9 years ago|reply
Sounds as ridiculous as Hollywood casting.
Seems like this would create a "Moneyball"-style opportunity for a hedge fund to actually invest in tech management, hire more objectively, and build a development team that's composed of talent that works well together rather than a random cast of prima donnas who won't get out bed for less than $1MM.
[+] [-] mailshanx|9 years ago|reply
Also, do you think any of these places might be open to hire a hybrid programmer-quant i.e. someone who isn't as good at math / programming as a typical quant/dev, but is good at connecting the two and working in the middle?
[+] [-] vostok|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FT_intern|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snickerbockers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technofiend|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt_wulfeck|9 years ago|reply
So many questions here. If you're doing a bootcamp and scoring among the "top java developers globally" then you're either exceptionally talented, your bootcamp is the most amazing thing in the world, or your sample set of "top java developers" is absolutely terrible.
[+] [-] rampage101|9 years ago|reply
Nobody is becoming a "top ranked" Java developer in 3 months.
I say this as somebody who spent many years developing in Java, and I was not even close to being the best on my team.
[+] [-] kafkaesq|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronchall|9 years ago|reply
You can't get from zero to hero in 3 months, but a talented person can go pretty far.
[+] [-] praptak|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user5994461|9 years ago|reply
HackerRank are simple exercices which can be done in a few minutes to one hour [online IDE, short single-file code]. It's trivial for anyone who can program, [except the screening tests in limited time with hard (or custom) exercises].
The bootcamp people with good ranking are likely people who started programming a long time ago, but never professionally. It's a given that they must be able to solve simple exercises.
[+] [-] ThrustVectoring|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AcerbicZero|9 years ago|reply
Edit: HackerRank looks like it measures aptitude more than anything.
[+] [-] southphillyman|9 years ago|reply
Wall Street/banks get a bad rep for a lot of reasons but you can still do "modern" development at some of them and the pay is not bad for the east coast. The project JPMorgan was hiring me for was "modern java" fwiw. I'm currently at a bank doing full stack "modern java" of the JHipster variety essentially (Spring boot, java 8 , angular 2).
[+] [-] arcanus|9 years ago|reply
Do they still insist on a mediocre base salary with completely not guaranteed annual bonus lump sum?
If you are a trader this makes perfect sense, but I've never quite understood it for programmers.
[+] [-] wlesieutre|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bogomipz|9 years ago|reply
Wow that is really invasive! There was no warning that you would be video recorded?
I am curios to what is the rationale behind needing to record potential candidates typing code on video?
[+] [-] ConnorG|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ones_and_zeros|9 years ago|reply
What?
[+] [-] IndianAstronaut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etf-to-mark|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chulk90|9 years ago|reply
As a former Wall Street tech person, I know that JP's story here is overly exaggerated (they're really rigid and still require 3.0 GPA from schools for the two-year tech program they mentioned).
In addition, there are many other companies like HackerRank, and the article fails to mention any of the complaints large corporations and candidates have expressed so far (like you see in the comment section).
[+] [-] raverbashing|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelvin0|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov
"Aleynikov was employed for two years, from May 2007 to June 2009, at Goldman at an ultimate salary of $400,000.[4][8] He left to join Teza Technologies, a competing high-frequency trading firm which offered to triple his pay"
[+] [-] hfsktr|9 years ago|reply
I can easily imagine that similar situations happen but for people without enough savings to keep going and even then they may not have as high a profile to have their reputation overshadow the headlines.
I feel like I am just shy of tinfoil hat territory but it's not the craziest thing I have ever though of.
[+] [-] atemerev|9 years ago|reply
While this should have probably been handled out of court, I understand why GS guys were pissed. Don't do that.
[+] [-] filereaper|9 years ago|reply
Why join at all if Silicon Valley and core tech jobs have competitive pay? What's the justification given equal hours of work/effort put on both sides.
[+] [-] rb808|9 years ago|reply
Nowadays you're supporting a 10 year old inbred system trying to implement some new regulatory project. No root access, often no access to production, github blocked at the firewall, 4 releases a year, half the staff in India.
Plus wages are lower than 10 years ago
Yeah Wall St was great. Not so much any more.
[+] [-] mh_yam|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] confluence|9 years ago|reply
No wonder their attrition is so high. Apparently they are incapable of observing the fact they are just an awful place to work, and instead of fixing that, they just shovel more developers into their meat grinder.
[+] [-] impostervt|9 years ago|reply
As a co-founder of the site, I wonder if he has any data to back that up.
[+] [-] madengr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clifanatic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NotSammyHagar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ar15saveslives|9 years ago|reply
Numbers can vary, but based on what I see, after 5-6 years of relevant experience, there's no difference between graduate of Top_20 and of noname college.
[+] [-] kafkaesq|9 years ago|reply
Financial institutions traditionally coveted graduates from Stanford and other big-name schools and people already working in Silicon Valley.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] isuckatcoding|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] applecore|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] komali2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zby|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dxbydt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angry_octet|9 years ago|reply
What a silly puff piece for JP Morgan and the 'coding bootcamp' puppy farms.
[+] [-] jorblumesea|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] josep2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] losteverything|9 years ago|reply
Wonder if salary and time off is worth a redive in.