Never worked for a bank but I've done financial services on and off. It's the worst industry I've ever worked for in terms of technology, technical debt, bureaucracy and skill of the average developer. There also tends to be an arrogance from the developers that think they're good just because their code is handling millions of dollars a day.
The also seem to be the worst with NIH syndrome. Where I am at the moment, we built our own database (essentially a front end around sybase to compensate for performance because no one knows what a transaction is), several schedulers, a reporting solution, a message bus (bought it and now everyone has to use it because of politics), to name a few. This seems typical in financial services.
I interned at Capital One and had the exact opposite of this article. They are pretty serious about being a tech company and the culture of the software engineer teams was on par with you would think a software company would be like. They definitely were switching to the newest technologies(to the extend federal regulations let them) and were pushing the cloud and ML big time. They are also moving all their tech from a small city to a big city. Hours are flexible and there was good work life balance. Maybe that is just the by product of being a younger and smaller organization.
I've had several clients in the banking / credit sector. Capital One is an outlier. They are as good as finance gets for the average developer.
On my second day I was given access to the full catalog of AWS. So yes they're all in on the cloud. ML use was visible too. That's not a lie. They have GitHub enterprise and an "open source" culture has grown up around a few projects there that are like internal open source. These projects are not governed by any department but lots of people contribute.
I plan to swing back through there again before I retire. It was fun.
Teams like strats or any quantitive developer roles may not be good either. There may be some interesting jobs in systems require ultra low latency if you get to build them from scratch or rewrite them.
It shouldn't come as a surprise, the bank interviews are way easier than interviews with google/facebook.
The sad reality is, in London there are very few employers pay as much as the financial service sector, if you can't get into google/facebook, and don't want to migrate to another country, you either work for a financial service company, or take a massive pay cut.
I work for a banking group. Top 3 private bank in my country, top 3 in HQ's country.
I couldn't agree more, even though I believe that "...Technologists are second class citizens in banks..." is an understatement.
You wouldn't believe the money we throw away in technology and software development only for political reasons.
I have enclosures full of servers and storage that have been waiting for conectivity for more than a year. We've decommissioned high end storage after their lifetime was over and they have never seen a byte! This is not in special circumstances, it's normal.
All this and we're still making money like nobody.
I fear that someday we'll be bought by someone competent, then we are fucked, because we couldn't stop the morons (or delinquents) that burned all this money for nothing.
Worked for two Fortune 500 real estate financial services companies. The pay was excellent. If I had family to support, I would not have left. The money was too good.
The work was unfulfilling; brown-nosing, meetings, horrendous code base. Refactoring does not exist in the enterprise vocabulary. The managers usually have masters in IT not CS so they weren't in touch with the engineers. We were forced to use expensive crappy SCM like ClearCase which required two administrators to make sense of it. All code was prescribed straight out of Microsoft enterprise application patterns. I felt like a drone.
I left on my own accord. I most enjoy the freedom to think outside the box. Job happiness level is high, pay could be better.
I can't speak to the author... but I've done a couple contracting stints at financial institutions... the first time was a great experience, everyone was at the top of their respective game, and it was a great team to work in, I'm actually working with a few people I worked with back then at a job I recently started.
The most recent time, was not very enjoyable at all... very litigious, slow moving and a recent project was built like it would have been a decade ago, ignoring all progress in the space, and getting it updated was akin to pulling teeth with the rest of the team. After a year, I was ready to not go back in.
I think the author is referring to Quant jobs here. They are not 100% software engineering/Developer jobs. One needs to have command over financial mathematics as well. In that sense, it's hard for a pure CS background candidate to get.
There is Goldman. And banks that emulate their culture. And there is everyone else.
The bad banks tech orgs are clubs for VIPs and friends and relatives of the business and the tech just doesn't matter, as a result you have a poisonous culture and an army of frauds. Especially true of the failed investment banks that got acquired by consumer banks. If you find yourself in the latter, and you are not part of the club (ie refuse to perpetuate the fraud of screwing over the business to enrich some tech executives agenda) run in the opposite direction. Join a trading firm instead.
lol Goldman with a proprietary secdb where techs and strats are locked into an ecosystem that they can't move out of whilst the firm is ironically trying to move off the silo?
I would agree with what the author has said. That being said, I believe it takes a certain individual to grow inside a bank (because I'm one of them) and I think it is different between teams. If you are not smart (but hardworking and willing to learn), you will thrive inside a bank.
I have a liberal arts major at a large-public university and have a minor in computer science. My offer at a large bank was the best offer I got and I got placed in an operation/support role. I have been in my current role for over two years and this is my first "real job" outside of college.
Even though it is not Google/Microsoft/Amazon, I am extremely happy in the position I am in. The first two years were difficult and it is not the type of role I want to do for the rest of my life, but working at the bank had some benefits. I get paid overtime hours and get to work remotely whenever I want. If I had a family or significant other I would be miserable. Recently there has been a mass exodus and layoffs in our team (due to a "location strategy"). I am able to do the work that used to take 4-5 people and there is only one other person in the Western Hemisphere that does my job.
I support what the bank calls a "critical application". There's very high probability that your money has moved through this application. There has been a lot of work for me to do and have been given flexibility because I work hard and get the job done. I get paid overtime (100 hours of overtime this past month). Even though I am happy at the moment, I know my current role is unsustainable and I intend on moving to another team within the bank or externally (at the end of the year where I will probably lose my overtime eligibility).
Our company provides services for self-learning (which usually costs hundreds of dollars a year) and bi-annual hackathons which gives me an outlet for actually programming. A project I worked on in one of these hackathons got patented recently. I live in a major US city which has two major hackerspaces and a plethora of jobs and career networking events/MeetUps. Since I am doing so much overtime, I make more than my salary capped associates and application developers (who are my age) and my mortgage will be paid off by the end of this year. I think my next career move will be in application development with one of the many teams I support at the moment or move into consulting.
If this is your only programming job then there's a good chance you're oblivious to a lot of problems and at that level of experience you shouldn't be expected to know better.
One of those red flags is having junior Devs working unsupervised on critical stuff.
I don't mean to sound rude or condescending, just that you have a lot to learn and I very much doubt you're learning good lessons there.
I did some research on Morgan Stanley a few years ago when I applied for a job there, and was surprised to find none of the top people (the members of the Executive Council, or whatever it was called) were engineers. I wasn't expecting much, maybe a CTO, but there was no one at all. It seemed very strange for a company that is heavily reliant on IT.
The closest they had to an engineer in that group was a risk control officer, with a stats background.
why wouldn't i want to live in Belfast or Poland? too few terrorists attacks, too few gangs, too low price of living, schengen with easy access to most of the Europe?
i would much more preferred those two cities instead of overpriced multicultural London with Muslim mayor
"why wouldn't i want to live in Belfast ... too few terrorists attacks"
My, how times have changed. I remember walking around parts of Belfast using the colours painted on the kerbs to check I wasn't straying into an area where my accent would get me in trouble.
Ah you were doing so well and I'd almost agree with you as a Londoner until you hit me with Muslim mayor. Frankly I'd much rather him than most of the flat out lying Oxford PPE scum.
I might not be a place for "coders", but it can be a pretty great place for engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists with an interest in finance and that love solving very hard problems using computers.
i don't I feel like every business that doesn't make money directly from technology is like this. In most companies tech is a black box as its hard to directly tie revenue against it.
[+] [-] flukus|9 years ago|reply
The also seem to be the worst with NIH syndrome. Where I am at the moment, we built our own database (essentially a front end around sybase to compensate for performance because no one knows what a transaction is), several schedulers, a reporting solution, a message bus (bought it and now everyone has to use it because of politics), to name a few. This seems typical in financial services.
[+] [-] Maven911|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sand500|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|9 years ago|reply
On my second day I was given access to the full catalog of AWS. So yes they're all in on the cloud. ML use was visible too. That's not a lie. They have GitHub enterprise and an "open source" culture has grown up around a few projects there that are like internal open source. These projects are not governed by any department but lots of people contribute.
I plan to swing back through there again before I retire. It was fun.
[+] [-] rainhacker|9 years ago|reply
I think most banks put a ton of effort to woo interns. I'd be interested to hear what someone full time there who worked for a few years has to say.
[+] [-] shanwang|9 years ago|reply
Teams like strats or any quantitive developer roles may not be good either. There may be some interesting jobs in systems require ultra low latency if you get to build them from scratch or rewrite them.
It shouldn't come as a surprise, the bank interviews are way easier than interviews with google/facebook.
The sad reality is, in London there are very few employers pay as much as the financial service sector, if you can't get into google/facebook, and don't want to migrate to another country, you either work for a financial service company, or take a massive pay cut.
[+] [-] madmulita|9 years ago|reply
I couldn't agree more, even though I believe that "...Technologists are second class citizens in banks..." is an understatement.
You wouldn't believe the money we throw away in technology and software development only for political reasons.
I have enclosures full of servers and storage that have been waiting for conectivity for more than a year. We've decommissioned high end storage after their lifetime was over and they have never seen a byte! This is not in special circumstances, it's normal.
All this and we're still making money like nobody.
I fear that someday we'll be bought by someone competent, then we are fucked, because we couldn't stop the morons (or delinquents) that burned all this money for nothing.
[+] [-] mmgutz|9 years ago|reply
The work was unfulfilling; brown-nosing, meetings, horrendous code base. Refactoring does not exist in the enterprise vocabulary. The managers usually have masters in IT not CS so they weren't in touch with the engineers. We were forced to use expensive crappy SCM like ClearCase which required two administrators to make sense of it. All code was prescribed straight out of Microsoft enterprise application patterns. I felt like a drone.
I left on my own accord. I most enjoy the freedom to think outside the box. Job happiness level is high, pay could be better.
[+] [-] tracker1|9 years ago|reply
The most recent time, was not very enjoyable at all... very litigious, slow moving and a recent project was built like it would have been a decade ago, ignoring all progress in the space, and getting it updated was akin to pulling teeth with the rest of the team. After a year, I was ready to not go back in.
[+] [-] scawf|9 years ago|reply
"There are some good jobs for developers in banking. [...] These jobs are hard to get though – I interviewed for a few, but I wasn’t successful."
So it's more.. don't go to a bank unless you are good enough ?
[+] [-] rainhacker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moon_of_moon|9 years ago|reply
The bad banks tech orgs are clubs for VIPs and friends and relatives of the business and the tech just doesn't matter, as a result you have a poisonous culture and an army of frauds. Especially true of the failed investment banks that got acquired by consumer banks. If you find yourself in the latter, and you are not part of the club (ie refuse to perpetuate the fraud of screwing over the business to enrich some tech executives agenda) run in the opposite direction. Join a trading firm instead.
I will bet OP was at a "club" bank.
[+] [-] throwaway_374|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l33r|9 years ago|reply
I have a liberal arts major at a large-public university and have a minor in computer science. My offer at a large bank was the best offer I got and I got placed in an operation/support role. I have been in my current role for over two years and this is my first "real job" outside of college.
Even though it is not Google/Microsoft/Amazon, I am extremely happy in the position I am in. The first two years were difficult and it is not the type of role I want to do for the rest of my life, but working at the bank had some benefits. I get paid overtime hours and get to work remotely whenever I want. If I had a family or significant other I would be miserable. Recently there has been a mass exodus and layoffs in our team (due to a "location strategy"). I am able to do the work that used to take 4-5 people and there is only one other person in the Western Hemisphere that does my job.
I support what the bank calls a "critical application". There's very high probability that your money has moved through this application. There has been a lot of work for me to do and have been given flexibility because I work hard and get the job done. I get paid overtime (100 hours of overtime this past month). Even though I am happy at the moment, I know my current role is unsustainable and I intend on moving to another team within the bank or externally (at the end of the year where I will probably lose my overtime eligibility).
Our company provides services for self-learning (which usually costs hundreds of dollars a year) and bi-annual hackathons which gives me an outlet for actually programming. A project I worked on in one of these hackathons got patented recently. I live in a major US city which has two major hackerspaces and a plethora of jobs and career networking events/MeetUps. Since I am doing so much overtime, I make more than my salary capped associates and application developers (who are my age) and my mortgage will be paid off by the end of this year. I think my next career move will be in application development with one of the many teams I support at the moment or move into consulting.
[+] [-] flukus|9 years ago|reply
One of those red flags is having junior Devs working unsupervised on critical stuff.
I don't mean to sound rude or condescending, just that you have a lot to learn and I very much doubt you're learning good lessons there.
[+] [-] johan_larson|9 years ago|reply
The closest they had to an engineer in that group was a risk control officer, with a stats background.
[+] [-] throwaway_374|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Markoff|9 years ago|reply
i would much more preferred those two cities instead of overpriced multicultural London with Muslim mayor
[+] [-] trosi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EliRivers|9 years ago|reply
My, how times have changed. I remember walking around parts of Belfast using the colours painted on the kerbs to check I wasn't straying into an area where my accent would get me in trouble.
[+] [-] throwaway_374|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] postgeographic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dagw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anon543210|9 years ago|reply