
If banks keep cutting employees why do they still have so many staff? - apapli
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-03/nab-bank-job-losses-automation/9112658
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yskchu
What the article says is true that traditional roles are disappearing but
they're hiring technology people like crazy.

Closing branches, automating branches, that's the direction it's going.
eBanking, less face-to-face transactions. Data scientists, etc, to datamine
all that valuable purchase history.

So employment-wise it's bad for the population at large, but good for us
techies still.

Here's an example of Goldman (not a traditional bank, but still relevant):

[http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-chart-google-
hiring](http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-chart-google-hiring)

~~~
hkmurakami
SVB also hiring a lot of engineers iirc.

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lexideximexi
I have recently come off a 6 month consulting gig at a major Australian bank.
One of which is discussed in the article. Having come from working within well
respected technology companies I have been stunned by the complete lack of
skill in their technology work force. Even the most basic of tasks couldn't be
automated due to overly locked down workstations used by staff, those tasks
that could be automated are outsourced to organisations that do not automate
either. Conservatively I would suggest that over 50% of the full time direct
technology employees do nothing on a weekly basis. I regularly came into the
office and discovered staff sitting around chatting or browsing the internet,
watching Youtube. I actually worked in a hot desk environment for a few weeks
around various teams and the situation was no better across large sections of
the organisation. At a guess in the 6 months gig I probably spent time with
around 1000 staff, of which probably under 50 could actually competently do
their job and that does not even touch on the outsourcing agreements. Multiple
network agreements with various outsourcing providers, no clear ownership,
vendors haggling over details, no clear escalation process, ridiculously crazy
per-job pricing models where the job was never actually completed correctly
and would often be charged multiple times to fix it, these multi-charges then
had to be challenged by teams of people. The whole situation made me realise
that it was time for me to head back to well respected technology companies.
The entire industry is ripe for a complete disruption. The in efficiencies,
useless staff, incompetence, crazy contract terms would mean there is no way
for these cumbersome oafs to complete with an even remotely agile
organisation.

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toomuchtodo
> The entire industry is ripe for a complete disruption. The in efficiencies,
> useless staff, incompetence, crazy contract terms would mean there is no way
> for these cumbersome oafs to complete with an even remotely agile
> organisation.

SimpleBank tried to do this in the US, and ended up with a lackluster
acquisition by BBVA [1]. Standard Treasury also tried this at the institution
level, and also ended up with a poor acqui-hire outcome [2]. Without being
able to be a technology company first, and a financial institution second,
these efforts are doomed to fail. I hate to say it, but the best companies to
attack this are Amazon, Google, and Walmart (companies that are either Agile
or ruthlessly efficient).

With that said, I feel your pain. I work in security for a financial utility
in the US, and some days, its impossible to get anything done. Use
opportunities like this to sharpen your bureaucracy hacking skills (and the
money isn't bad either). Failures are only lessons you don't learn from.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_(bank)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_\(bank\))

[2]
[https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/blog/techflash/2015/08/s...](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/blog/techflash/2015/08/silicon-
valley-bank-acqui-hires-y-combinator.html)

~~~
jamy015
It seems like Bunq [1] is having some success in this space in Europe. Revolut
[2], while not a bank in the traditional sense, also seems to be doing well.

[1] [https://www.bunq.com/](https://www.bunq.com/)

[2] [https://www.revolut.com/](https://www.revolut.com/)

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osullivj
Bank employment profiles are very pro cyclical. Retail branches can be cut,
but HQ buildings and systems are the fixed cost. Beyond that, as economies
cycle up and down banks meet rising and falling demand by hiring and firing.
This trend is especially pronounced in investment banking, where returns are
especially volatile.

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tyingq
It's not normalized against the population growth. And even "population
growth" is misleading for AU. They don't count all the people living there.

Bank employees per capita would be more interesting.

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epx
Hiring is seldom news.

~~~
thisisit
Exactly. Focusing on one aspect while ignoring the other will also lead to
questions.

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mdip
While I realize this article is focusing on the more traditional "bankers
jobs", every time I read an article about jobs at banks, I think of things
I've been told by a few close friends who worked in the industry (back when my
area had a few banks who's headquarters were local).

I am good friends with a couple of folks who worked in bank IT. Both have told
me similar stories despite working for different companies and not knowing
each-other, so I'm reasonably convinced of their accuracy. Though it might be
something limited to these local banks (who were not huge players by any
stretch), I get the impression it's a common thing. Both worked in IT, one in
development and one in "everything except development and mainframe[0]". The
non-dev guy told me that about every 6 months, the bank would axe an _entire
department_ \-- and not just some oddball, unimportant department -- in one
case it was a large group of people responsible for administration around
loans and mortgages. This department would _cease to exist_ despite being once
considered a necessity (and arguably still a necessity). Three months later,
they'd hire in a bunch of folks and create a department that was effectively
doing what the axed department was doing (sometimes under the same name and
staffed with many of the same people).

Non-core departments like HR and IT would be ebb and flow in radical ways --
my developer friend was let go when they just decided they were going to pay a
company in India to build all of their apps and abandoned the local Java
developers who were hired on to reduce their dependency on the mainframe,
which never happened.

The environment they described sounds like a caricature of "Office Space".
There was one case where a guy worked a pay-period too long and discovered he
was supposed to have been let go only when his direct deposit didn't appear in
his bank account and one case where they had to sue a former employee because
he was notified 5 years ago that his position was cut, he'd stopped coming
into work, yet they continued to pay him and he continued to cash the checks.

They've both been out of "Bank IT" for a long time, now, but I'm fairly
certain these issues persisted at least until 2010. I recall one of the banks,
when they started offering "Online Banking", required you to use your social
security number as your logon ID and limited passwords to case-insensitive,
letters only, with a 10 character maximum. It just had the smell of being a
clear-text password stored in a varchar(10) field on a database without case
sensitivity turned on. And companies like American Express were (are?) doing
things almost as badly.

Because of all of this, I have a feeling the article has some things wrong. My
sense is that the banks these guys worked for never really had a net job loss,
they just operated in a revolving-door fashion -- axing departments while
increasing headcount in others, and then repeating every few months with the
departments names' being pulled out of a hat. I don't doubt that large sums of
money are thrown into automation, particularly around algorithmic trading,
because it directly makes the bank money (but I doubt that's happening at any
of the smaller banks like the ones that my friends worked for).

From what I understand, the same people that were let go from IT in the last
round of layoffs are the only ones they can get to apply for the new jobs[1].
My buddy in IT -- who saw his department go from 10 employees to ... him and
his boss ... ended up being re-staffed a few months later with five folks who
had just been let go from a local competing bank and worked in IT for his boss
at some point in the past... it was a revolving door with the same people
going in and out of it.

[0] And it was quite literally _everything_. This was early 2000 so that
included the handful of traditional racked servers, routers, and the small
number of endpoint-desktops connected via 16Mb Token-ring and given mostly to
executives for them to use the screen-savers, Lotus 1-2-3 and terminal program
to access the mainframe. He was supposed to be responsible only for the
servers/network, but often found himself stuck working on the help desk and
doing end-user support due to staffing constraints.

[1] Prior to meeting these two fine gentlemen, I applied for a job that I
eventually turned down because I was so disappointed with the quality of
individuals that interviewed me. The woman I talked to couldn't hide her
disappointment, but there was something off that I later came to believe could
be summed up by the phrase "yeah, not surprised".

