
JPMorgan Suffered Exodus of Tech Talent Before Breach by Hackers - zabalmendi
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-05/jpmorgan-had-exodus-of-tech-talent-before-hacker-breach.html
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twistedpair
Having worked at a JPMo competitor for several years, we did certainly value
IT. At most such shops IT spend is around $3 Billion a year, so they're not
messing around. Many even created specific dev centers around the world (i.e.
London, Moscow, India, RTP, Dallas) specifically to do just dev.

But, the real kicker is at few such firms will you find the tech "talent."
They might join mistakenly, but usually they'll get out within a year or two
to better pastures at startups or SV. What often remains are the folks that
are mainly task masters at CRUD forms, but not anyone that thinks about the
merits of various architectures, reads up on optimal coding practices, or that
learns in their free time. Nope, those are the high paid "contractors" that
are hired when folks can't figure out why a six foot long query is running
slowly.

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vonmoltke
> Many even created specific dev centers around the world (i.e. London,
> Moscow, India, RTP, Dallas) specifically to do just dev.

Being in Dallas, I have poked around at openings for some of them. They seem
to be the epitome of enterprise HR buzzword bingo.

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otakucode
One might be persuaded to believe that IT is actually something that provides
a monetarily significant benefit to an organization... but we know that can't
be true. Just because every iota of every business flows through computers and
even minor software projects can multiply the productivity of employees by an
order of magnitude, that doesn't mean management should be expected to value
IT in such a way that they actually are willing to pay significant amounts for
it!

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lukasm
I worked for a while for Morgan Stanley and have 20 friends that work in
finance.

They pay a lot for IT. Good hacker can make 300k, but the main problem that
big banks have is complexity. Years of M&A, 20 systems that do the same.
Simply paying more is not a solution.

~~~
VonGuard
Yup. You like supporting COBOL? FORTRAN? How about some PL/1 running on AIX or
something equally as byzantine... M&A can ruin your will to live.

~~~
opendais
Bah, at least PL/1 is still maintained by IBM.

Come back when the language you are running on that AIX system is completely
dead since before 1990 and there is no online documentation for it. ;)

~~~
VonGuard
ALGOL

~~~
opendais
Fair enough :)

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brational
So tangentially related but what does it take to increase wages in the US?
We've been hearing the rhetoric for a while now that over the past 10/20/30
years productivity improvements simply go to the top and real wages decline
with the hand-waving recourse that it's just the way capitalism works. But how
do you actually prevent this?

Unions are obviously one solution but can be wrought with other issues.
Besides that, it seems there really is no solution to wage stagnation outside
of major failures or security breaches which hit the business' pockets
directly.

I don't just mean in IT but it does seem to be an area where salary growth
doesn't match up _at all_ with the amount of value it adds to a business,
especially in the case of IT within a non-IT company.

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innguest
In my view, salaries for programmers should be going down, not up.

For instance, I think house construction is overpriced because I think "what's
so hard about putting up walls around some ground?". The answer is everything
is hard about it. But that it is hard is incidental. By that I mean, it was
harder before, and now it is easier, and it should get even easier (there are
3D printers printing houses now) and therefore cheaper.

A non-programmer thinks the same way about software as I do about houses:
"what's so hard about telling the computer to do grab this data and transform
it?". Well, all of it is hard, but again, it's incidental. It would have been
more expensive in the past because it was harder, and it will be easier in the
future (Docker, NixOS, mathematically proven programs that do not require
maintenance, etc).

It's nice being a programmer today but we won't ride this forever. As we
automate ourselves out of the market, it will be a net benefit to everyone (as
no one will have to program as hard or as much as today).

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ebiester
That just means we will be tackling harder problems. The problems we were
solving in the 70s were much simpler than the ones today. Today, we're
handling things that we would have never considered possible before.

On the other hand, something that hasn't changed in 40 years is that end users
are not able to precisely explain what they want. That is why we will always
have jobs. There will always be some sort of exceptional rule.

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_random_
Do financial houses even refer to any of IT staff as "talent"? Usually when
they say "talent" they mean traders and senior staff.

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johansch
Given how important high frequency trading has become, I would guess the
developers working on that is held in high regard.

Sysadmins/"IT people" are probably seen as janitorial.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I was recently offered a DevOps job at Citidel making well over $150K/year in
Chicago. I don't consider that as "janitorial".

~~~
_random_
That's a good money (providing it's not a 24h job), but what about treatment?
Sales people make more than average devs at Google, but who gets more respect?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Which is why I took a lower paying DevOps job at a startup. I make less, but
the people I work with are incredible, not just in their talent, but as a
whole. I'd rather not swim with sharks.

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enjoy-your-stay
Reminds me a bit of the problems RBS had after large cutbacks and outsourcing
had removed a lot of the in house expertise from their batch processing team.

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/28/rbs_job_cuts_and_off...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/28/rbs_job_cuts_and_offshoring_software_glitch/)

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Confusion
If the security of the JPM website depends on 5 executive level employees
leaving within a short time, then there certainly is something to worry about.

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skippy81
"The departures meant that executives with intimate knowledge of JPMorgan’s
systems..."

Working most of my life in financial services, executives dont have intimate
knowledge unless the systems in place happen to be the same ones they helped
build 10-15 years ago (which is true in some cases).

I still consider myself hands on, although not cutting code on a daily basis,
and I dont have intimate knowledge of those systems. They will still phone me
at 2am despite that.

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rbc
I'm not surprised at all. The article focuses on leadership brain drain, but I
think it's more basic then that. Really complicated systems are getting built
and deployed every day. After a while, the folks who built the system don't
really know how it works anymore, because they are busy building the next
thing.

After a little longer, the underlying infrastructure (OS and native
libraries), platform (java, node, ruby, etc...) and persistence (Oracle,
MySQL, MongoDB, you get the idea...) starts to become vulnerable to zero-day
exploits and you get one of these big breaches. Maybe I'm just being cynical
;)

It's sort of like the old rusty ship that finally sinks. It happens all the
time...

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GrinningFool
"

The departures meant that executives with intimate knowledge of JPMorgan’s
systems... were gone"

Yeah, um, worked there. At least in my line of business and those others I was
exposed to, losing the executives may have been beneficial in terms of
knowledge because it's _possible_ that the newcomers would try to learn the
stuff that the departees never bothered to know in the first place.

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chase_anon32
Having also worked there, I can confirm. How little most managers and
executives know and understand about the systems they own can be quite
shocking. Their sole focus seems to be playing office politics to get more
funding assigned to their projects.

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hiharryhere
As someone who used to work in tech at JPM, the exodus doesn't really surprise
me. Though I don't think a few execs leaving would precipitate this kind of
event.

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known
IT dept in GS is more efficient than JPM.

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notastartup
Does geography play a large role in being able to get into such large banking
organization? It sounds so easy from the comments.

