

11k Citi employees fired. Help get them hired in tech. - darrellsilver
http://retrain-citi.thinkful.com/

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sturadnidge
At the risk of sounding like a heartless bastard upholding tired old
stereotypes, enterprise scale retail banking is probably the last place the
majority of startups should consider a 'talent pool'. In places like Citi,
change is something to be feared, silos are everywhere and 'lean' is probably
unheard of (at least in IT circles).

Kudos for at least providing an opportunity for people to improve themselves
though. And the sentiment of course.

~~~
SatvikBeri
I have kind of mixed feelings about this. I worked at Citi, and the average
person there is actually pretty smart. They're just tied down by all the
bureaucracy, which ends up killing their creativity and motivation.

This can turn into an advantage once you leave, though. Once you join a decent
company you get _very_ motivated to do your best, because you never want to go
back.

~~~
streptomycin
But would the 11k laid off be average employees, or the bottom 5%?

~~~
SatvikBeri
The smartest people will often end up performing terribly at bad companies.
Being unable to act is not a huge deal for an average person, but it can be
devastating and demotivating for someone who's used to getting shit done.

And honestly? I don't believe Citi management knows enough to know who their
bottom 5% are.

~~~
michaelochurch
You nailed it outright. I award an Indignation for your this post. I will also
award one to Thinkful for this brilliant marketing move. So it's a Joint
Indignation I award today: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtCiP8B2xpc#t=7s>

If 100 is the typical productivity of a smart person when she's making the
technical calls, picking the tools, and writing a new system, most corporate
environments expect software engineers to function at 5-10-- maybe 20-30 when
they get to senior dev roles. The problem is that if you're used to 100+, that
feels like being at 0. It's demoralizing when your productivity is a rounding
error for environmental reasons that aren't your fault.

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mseebach
Where's the indication that NYC tech talent was hit in any significant way?
From the linked article:

 _About 35 percent of the fourth-quarter costs are tied to eliminating 6,200
jobs in consumer banking, with operations set to be sold or scaled back in
Pakistan, Paraguay, Romania, Turkey and Uruguay, according to the statement.
Branches will be reduced in five other nations, including 44 in the U.S._

~~~
untog
It might be that no-one in NYC was fired. But I imagine that the people
employed by Citi in the city (zing) are still a little nervous about their
long-term prospects. When shareholders cheer people being fired, you have to
wonder if you're next.

That said, it does make Thinkful's offer to "ex-Citi employees" a little less
likely to be taken up.

~~~
mseebach
I strongly doubt that anyone in Citi you'd want to hire for a startup is
working under any kind of illusion that Citi is an employment project. If your
unit isn't profitable (enough), it's shut. Of course the stock market likes
that - or rather, dislikes the opposite.

~~~
kyllo
I read the message as "Your industry sucks to work in now, doesn't it? Why not
come to our website to study web programming online so you can come join the
tech startup industry instead?"

~~~
mseebach
That's a very charitable reading.

It's a PR play for the training outfit, and not a terribly good one, IMO.

~~~
kyllo
The post is an advertisement to be sure. But they are being somewhat
charitable themselves by giving their service away for free to ex-Citi
employees.

~~~
bitcartel
Ah, but how many get the full service, and not just online course material?
How do they scale their "one-on-one help" to 11k people?

Thinkful only get paid when a hiring manager employs somebody that they
introduced. If I were to be an old curmudgeon, this is PR off the back of bad
news, to try and scalp potential leads and resumes.

------
alanbyrne
Citi was one of the best places I have ever worked.

Sure it was tightly controlled with various security precautions, change
control and the other banking regulator requirements which made it impossible
to be a hacker and to get things done quickly.

But as a workplace it left me with fond memories.

~~~
darrellsilver
Awesome. Were you recently laid off?

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rbadaro
From my experience working at a large Investment Bank, the strong performers
normally do keep up to date with new technology developments or have otherwise
a strong base knowledge that allows them to pick up new things by themselves.
The masses largely prefer to have a corporate job for as much pay as possible
- this was the first workplace where I heard a number of people explicitly say
they are only there for the money and in some cases actually want the
redundancy packages.

In my view the good opportunity for other companies in these situations is
that a number of stronger performers decide to leave by themselves when this
happens, for multiple reasons - they are overworked because their teams are
reduced, low morale, etc. These are the ones that are interesting to capture.

------
arbuge
But would they be good matches for tech jobs? On what basis are you reaching
that conclusion?

~~~
darrellsilver
Excellent question.

Simply put: We follow where growing companies are looking for talent. That's
our indicator.

Banks, hedge funds and other parts of the financial sector use a hell of a lot
of fancy tech (they're the first "big data" after all), and there's a lot of
expertise that's been locked up there for too long.

When I left finance (4.5 years, 4 years ago... hells yeah) I had all sorts of
engineering skills, but knew nothing of the companies, how to evaluate
employers, or what exact tools were most in demand or growing.

Helping people answer those questions more quickly than I could is our
mission.

~~~
michaelochurch
One thing I like about finance is that they are better than most corporations
at respecting and evaluating intelligence. They don't reject the 140+ IQ set
outright in the way that most corporate environments (even some startups) do.
Financial companies may restrain and underemploy such people with bureaucratic
nonsense, but they also pay for the pain.

The problem with the developer economy is that paid work has very low career
efficiency. There's just a lot of glop work to go around, and most engineers
don't have the political pull to get past it and on to the interesting stuff,
which they're perceived as underqualified for because of their track record of
crappy work (even if done well). Most engineers have about a 75% slack ratio
in their careers, which prevents them from ever getting really good. But give
a decently smart and motivated engineer 5 years of full autonomy and you'll
have the guys and gals that people make Chuck Norris jokes about.

------
gprasanth
On another (un?)related note, Citibank ran a 'Cyber Monday' in India where

    
    
        "it would provide discounts of up to 60 per cent"
    

[http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-12-02/news...](http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-12-02/news/35546881_1_citibank-
plans-indian-market-ecommerce-players)

------
eurodance
_"MVC, Backbone, wireframing ... Django, Rails, Node, Hadoop ... Amazon Web
Services & Heroku ... Git in a Nutshell Continuous deployment & TDD"_

They should teach more than just the latest (popular) concepts/languages like
node, ruby, python. There seems to be little mention of important concepts
such as data types, pointers, and OOP.

~~~
kyllo
Nothing wrong with learning Javascript and Ruby or Python off the bat instead
of starting with something like Java or C/C++. But you might want to start the
course with stuff like programming language basics, database basics, and SQL
if they're coming from non-programming positions.

It's also a little overkill to cover Django, Rails, AND Node.js in one course,
isn't it?

I guess I'm not sure if the ad is targeted at Citigroup's software/IT people
(who already know a lot of this stuff and are probably not the folks getting
laid off) or the other (finance/accounting/admin/sales/customer
service/operations) people (who probably need to start from the square-one
basics of web programming).

~~~
darrellsilver
Fair question. We don't think you can learn from scratch any of these topics
in three weeks, let alone all of them, to be employable at any of them. What
we're talking about are people who are proficient in a given language or topic
already, and who want to see a crash course, and get a taste, before deciding
what to do next.

Our candidates are basically already very employable, but there's an extra
risk we help employers avoid: that a new hire won't enjoy or become proficient
in this new subject quickly (read: cheaply).

Thinkful is all about cost savings for employers, and candidates finding what
they're really interested in.

Know java really, really well? Maybe you'll enjoy scala. But perhaps give it a
trial run for a few weeks (along with some other cool stuff) before jumping in
to a job for several years.

------
themckman
Am I the only one that read that as "Dear Citi employees, sucks you got fired.
You're probably bad at what you do; let us help."?

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michaelochurch
This is brilliant marketing by Thinkful.

