
“Banks are no place for coders” - rainhacker
http://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/276069/problems-with-coding-jobs-in-banks/
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flukus
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.

~~~
Maven911
This sounds exactly like life at a bank I know in the capital markets
division.

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sand500
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.

~~~
ryanmarsh
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.

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shanwang
Agree.

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.

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madmulita
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.

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mmgutz
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.

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scawf
The article is a bit contradictory:

"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
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.

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tracker1
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.

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moon_of_moon
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.

I will bet OP was at a "club" bank.

~~~
throwaway_374
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?

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johan_larson
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.

~~~
throwaway_374
I've never worked for MS but my impression was that they are a decent tech
bunch (corely Java). Also you can't really beat
[http://www.morganstanley.com/profiles/bjarne-stroustrup-
mana...](http://www.morganstanley.com/profiles/bjarne-stroustrup-managing-
director-technology)

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l33r
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.

~~~
flukus
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.

~~~
l33r
I know I have a lot to learn. I am not a programmer for my job role. I program
has a hobby. I run the operations side: support, deployments, and business
analyst type work. I am not oblivious to the problems because I see all the
problems when I am facing the product side of the business.

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Markoff
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

~~~
trosi
I was ready to agree with you until I saw the remark about the "Muslim mayor".
What does his religion have to do with anything?

~~~
Markoff
nothing really, I just think mayor of city should represent majority of
population and be one of them and yes I am aware majority (in theory, not
really familiar with attendance of voters) voted for him

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dagw
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.

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PaulHoule
Belfast isn't that bad.

~~~
richev
Good Guinness

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anon543210
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.

