Wall Street's Frantic Push to Hire Coders
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
These are awful to use and often require a new profile per company to apply, so applying to a few companies could take hours depending on the work experience required to fill out.
For godsake, enable the quick-apply feature of LinkedIn so your applicants don't have to spend hours labouring over your custom application. [3]
Make recruiting easier for prospective applicants and HR with something like Greenhouse. [4]
[1] https://jpmchase.taleo.net/careersection/2/moresearch.ftl
[2] https://careers-fidelitylife.icims.com/jobs/search?hashed=-4...
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search?keywords=Bank+of+Americ...
It boggles the mind that a company can devote half a dozen designers to optimizing the experience for potential customers, but for potential employees it's "Well, HR says you have to fill out this form, and I guess what they say goes."
You could always request applicants include a word in the subject to filter out spam and people that can't follow instructions.
I generally don't apply when I see a complex form. Instead I try emailing the company.
Related: It's amazing how many HR depts are not equipped to handle a submission of the form "My CV and projects are on janedoe.com/cv.html, let me know if you'd like to talk." In a sane world, that would be the default by now.
I get people calling me because they found my contact information on my website, then demanding that I send them a "Word copy of your resume". A) there's a PDF there already. B) There's more up to date information in the site itself and C) WTF - don't call me then demand I send you something in another format. You only want it in Word format so you can edit it up anyway. (mostly recruiters, I know, but still pisses me off).
I once interviewed myself for a position via a pretty large company's body shop subsidiary. Not really sure how they got my resume.
Sharing an email account (devjobs@mycompany.com) scales is nicely for a few jobs with light candidate flow. It can start to break down when trying to organize things in a meaningful way for all parties, but mildy disciplined use of a Gmail account is pretty solid when compared to much heavier solutions, like Taleo.
Due to the large number of administrative tasks (posting ads, scheduling interviews, etc.), the walled garden platforms that refuse to give you (and each other) decent API access, and the number of relationships to stay on top of, there's really no substitute for good someone who stays on top of it all.
As a hiring manager, if you insist on managing the process end to end, you're the recruiter, too :)
That would have been one hell of an addition to my resume, and it's far more likely that plain email would have worked. Of course, a recruiter wouldn't have got his cut...
I've given up applying to companies because of their process.
Some are privacy abusing from the get go. Or some ask you several different irrelevant questions. "No, I'm not a veteran" "No, I do not have protected status, yadda, yadda, yadda, etc, etc, etc". While laws may require you to ask some of those, there's no need to have one page for each question, or to ask them for candidates outside of the US
(A huge pet peeve of mine: US centric questionnaires)
Michael Scott was right; I'd shoot Toby twice, too.
We've also built and API middleware to abstract Taleo complexity in a simple and elegant REST API http://rolepoint.io/
Wall Street banks used to be a very good spot for programmers due to:
- big pay, this was often enough to not need more benefits
- what you often got to work on was very interesting
- hours worked tended to be no where near what they were in the hedge fund or startup scene.
They also leaned heavily on credentialism for hiring signals, mostly through where you went to school and secondarily by where you worked before.
Banks have found over the past 10 years that they are no longer a top choice for the best STEM students any more due to a number of factors and hence they have to move down the food chain.
Specifically:
- shrinking size of most of these banks due to decreased profits for the sell side firms
- shrinking pay due above.
- The tech scene and buy side, hedge funds, offer better pay, more interesting work, and much better career upside(moving up in the sell side anymore is cut throat due to shrinking head counts and bonuses).
I know next to nothing of hackerrank but anything that helps opens up the hiring pipeline is a good idea.
As to pay being partially based on bonuses. I mean this isn't going away, and if you don't like it, then you probably won't work in finance at all. Its analogous to startups. You may still get a great base salary, but options will always be a decent portion of your salary.
If you really want to get angry at bonuses. I've had recruiters tell me that many hedge funds have a cut off of $500,000/year bonus for looking for programmers, ie they won't interview programmers who haven't had a bonus of more than $500,000 in a year as they feel it provides one of the better hiring signals. You'd think this would stop them from hiring but there are alot of programmers in the HFT scene who easily pass this bar.
Sounds as ridiculous as Hollywood casting.
Seems like this would create a "Moneyball"-style opportunity for a hedge fund to actually invest in tech management, hire more objectively, and build a development team that's composed of talent that works well together rather than a random cast of prima donnas who won't get out bed for less than $1MM.
But to be fair, its based on two things:
1) No one just gives money away, especially to the programmers over the "traders". So if a programmer gets $500,000 you can be fairly certain more than a few people really think the programmer is worth it.
2) It's the people version of "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". Someone else has already vouched for this person, based on the compensation they gave the programmer. So if he/she turns out to be a bad hire, hey, not our fault, Citadel thought they were worth it.
I mean, if I've already gotten that, why would I want to go to your company for less?
Also it's more about using better techniques to identify talent
It's bad logic to accept and grow people from other industries.
Corollary: Other companies refuse to hire people on the basis that they charge too much.
Also, do you think any of these places might be open to hire a hybrid programmer-quant i.e. someone who isn't as good at math / programming as a typical quant/dev, but is good at connecting the two and working in the middle?
So many questions here. If you're doing a bootcamp and scoring among the "top java developers globally" then you're either exceptionally talented, your bootcamp is the most amazing thing in the world, or your sample set of "top java developers" is absolutely terrible.
I'm not doubting that this gentlemen could possibly be extremely talented. What I think is clear is the criteria for "best globally" skews towards theoretical knowledge without concern for real-world abilities.
Kind of like saying "this guy nailed the whiteboard interview better than everyone else, therefore he must be among the top developers globally".
People who already have tech careers aren't going to see the point in doing a ton of tests on HackerRank. It's not surprising that one of the top scorers was someone who lived in a town where he couldn't get a job using compsci skills. He was looking for a way to prove his skills since he didn't have credentials or work experience.
Edit: HackerRank looks like it measures aptitude more than anything.
Nobody is becoming a "top ranked" Java developer in 3 months.
I say this as somebody who spent many years developing in Java, and I was not even close to being the best on my team.
Don't get me wrong - I've used it ( but not extensively ) and it's not scary or anything, but there would eb a few things what would take some woodshedding.
Even then, there's many, many more than one way to use Java.
You can't get from zero to hero in 3 months, but a talented person can go pretty far.
That sounds like somebody who plugged a graphics card into his computer and elevated that to some CV highlight.
Depending on his age it might also have been replacing blown caps some years back when that was a big problem.
HackerRank are simple exercices which can be done in a few minutes to one hour [online IDE, short single-file code]. It's trivial for anyone who can program, [except the screening tests in limited time with hard (or custom) exercises].
The bootcamp people with good ranking are likely people who started programming a long time ago, but never professionally. It's a given that they must be able to solve simple exercises.
Wall Street/banks get a bad rep for a lot of reasons but you can still do "modern" development at some of them and the pay is not bad for the east coast. The project JPMorgan was hiring me for was "modern java" fwiw. I'm currently at a bank doing full stack "modern java" of the JHipster variety essentially (Spring boot, java 8 , angular 2).
Do they still insist on a mediocre base salary with completely not guaranteed annual bonus lump sum?
If you are a trader this makes perfect sense, but I've never quite understood it for programmers.
[edit] Saving 10K on a programmer, even multiplied over 1000 programmers isn't going to amount to a hill of beans in a crisis where the bank is at risk. My suspicion is that tech management at banks have adopted this system because they're failed middle managers and it helps them pretend that they're BSDs with the ability to swing pnl.
To back this up, I can draw on the experiences of my friends and former colleagues across the Street, and a large number of hair-raising interviews at other banks that made me repeatedly wonder why I would trade in the devil I know for a dumpster fire.
At the end of the day though, "the best in class" is still not "good".
I guess it's better than the "unfunded pension because they don't come due for 50 years when we'll be totes making bank" approach...
I have at various points in my life accepted 100% variance in pay by choosing to work freelance. It was an acceptable risk because I controlled not just the tech but also the nature of the business, and had reasonable confidence that I could make choices which would result in a satisfactory rate of return on my effort expended. Accepting employment as an engineer while also accepting the financial risk of other people's choices about how to run their business, choices you explicitly have no influence over?? That's not risk, that's an exploitation lottery.
But I would take a job with a 50% chance of making 200k and a 50% chance of making 100k over a job with a 100% chance of making 125k even if the outcome was determined by a coin flip. +EV is +EV whether I am responsible for the impact or not.
The reason that this is done is because investment banks tend to have larger revenue swings than many other businesses. Due to this, they want to be able to more easily adjust their costs (of which people are a huge %) relatively easily. It's much easier to adjust bonuses up and down than base salaries.
My current employer gets over this hurdle by guaranteeing your bonus for 1-2 years, thus giving them time to build trust before the variable compensation gets going.
If you think about what the company is saying, it's "If we fail at our business this year, we'll pay you less despite all your work." Even if that was only a 10% chance, meaning I'd statistically win, I wouldn't work there because they're looking to shit on me for their fuckups.
And it's far more likely that they'll specifically and intentionally defraud you by faking the performance metric, and reward themselves the bonus they "saved" by not paying you.
In fact you probably shouldn't work with anyone else because whenever you do that your success is, at least in some ways, tied in with their success. Best to work alone all by yourself where you don't ever have to trust anyone else.
Surely this would result in extremely high turnover? High turnover employers is probably something you want to avoid anyway, so I don't see this changing the equation much.
Quant technologists are a different beast. Like traders, they eat what they kill, and a 50/500 payout matrix may well make sense for them.
Financial first: deferring compensation from continuous throughout the year to a lump sum at the end is essentially getting your employees to lend you money. Depending on the implied terms of the loan (ie, how much extra you have to pay your employees in order to get them to agree to defer some of their compensation), it may be a better source of funding than issuing debt or equity. That's why banks and broker/dealers like the deferred bonus compensation model.
On the regulatory side, banks and broker/dealers are required to maintain a minimum amount of capital. Guaranteed bonuses would count as liabilities, reducing capital. Discretionary bonuses, however, don't have to be counted as a liability for regulatory capital purposes, so they don't reduce your regulatory capital. (They still count as liabilities under GAAP though.) That regulation is why they like to make them discretionary.
Disclaimer: regulatory capital definitely works like this for non-bank broker/dealers. Banks are subject to different rules, with which I am less familiar, but I would guess they work the same way with respect to discretionary compensation.
Also, when the bonus comes in it is paid out in two portions - one immediately, and one six months later. This helps retention, since there is always a carrot for the employee to look forward to every six months.
Think of it this way: would you rather get a 5-6 figure bonus most years, or a 6-7 figure stock option liquidity event in 3-7 years with a 95% probably of zero and you don't find out until after the 3-7 years have passed?
Fundamentally, they serve the same purpose, to tie compensation to company performance. But banks still expect to be around 50 years from now and earn profits the whole time, startups expect to take a big gamble on growth and then cash out in a big event and sort of change form. If you're a VC the latter is a pretty good deal because you only have to pay LT capital gains tax, not ordinary income; and obviously you're able to de-risk through diversification, unlike employees.
The bonus structure in banks is there so they can set salaries to be more like a percent of the company's revenue that year, except people refuse to accept salary decreases so they have to call it something else. If you compare it to pre-IPO stock options, it seems like it could be a lot less risky from the point of view of the employee.
What?
This difference can be very confusing in a lot of circumstances though. I wonder if perhaps a new word is needed.
Wow that is really invasive! There was no warning that you would be video recorded?
I am curios to what is the rationale behind needing to record potential candidates typing code on video?
If you can't figure out if you want to hire someone in < 1 hr talking to them, you suck at hiring.
There's really only two things to programming-as-a-job:
1)How much dog does somebody have in 'em? Determination frequently trumps everything else.
2) How good are they at knowing when to back up a notch, punt or roll it all back?
You don't figure that out with fizzbuzz.
As far as I can see it is. This seems to be suggesting that they are replacing the traditional route of hiring from tier 1 universities. This is how they filled graduate jobs. They still do this, to more or less the same extent, but that's only a smallish proportion of overall hires.
For experienced hires, most of the devs come from other financial institutions. Their stat of 10% new hires is misleading. That's 10% churn per bank not 10% added to the industry as a whole.
All the banks are looking for more avenues for finding developers. Although they usually prefer people with relevant experience, they are relatively hard to come by and are expensive.
Bringing people in from other fields has been going on for a while. What JPM are doing in Delaware doesn't look a million miles away from what they did in Glasgow 15 or so years ago but on a much larger scale. There they largely recruited from utilities companies if I recall correctly.
So yes, the banks are looking outside finance more than they did in the past but it's really not a novel thing at all.
My own preferred approaches are internships for junior developers, code review for intermediates, and evaluation of the strength of record for truly senior hires.
http://short-sharp.blogspot.ca/2013/04/stop-white-board-codi...
Bloomberg (the tech side of the company, not the journalism side that produced this article) uses HackerRank for developer hiring too.
As a former Wall Street tech person, I know that JP's story here is overly exaggerated (they're really rigid and still require 3.0 GPA from schools for the two-year tech program they mentioned).
In addition, there are many other companies like HackerRank, and the article fails to mention any of the complaints large corporations and candidates have expressed so far (like you see in the comment section).
Your comment seems to have an off by one error. What is the other option?
Or it usually relies on an inflated (and slightly cultish) sense of self importance to have a job candidate do a "dog and pony show" for a job opening.
"Company X is hiring hackers". I'll pass.
Ummmm.... Look up...^^^^
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov
"Aleynikov was employed for two years, from May 2007 to June 2009, at Goldman at an ultimate salary of $400,000.[4][8] He left to join Teza Technologies, a competing high-frequency trading firm which offered to triple his pay"
While this should have probably been handled out of court, I understand why GS guys were pissed. Don't do that.
Source: any article about his case.
- GS cites "500 million lines of code". This is most certainly including all dependencies (I deal with HFT systems and usually they are not _that_ complicated), so it is probably correct that 99% of the code was indeed open source.
- He uploaded the tarball with the code to his "server in Germany" (Hetzner, I presume). Sounds scary to the judges, but of course, having a server at Hetzner is perfectly normal.
- He deleted .bash_history. Quite a red flag for me.
And anyway, why repack and upload open source code as a tarball?
BTW, here's what Goldman Sachs published on Github: https://github.com/goldmansachs (GS Collections are well-known, but not a lot of code expected from a big company).
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...
I can easily imagine that similar situations happen but for people without enough savings to keep going and even then they may not have as high a profile to have their reputation overshadow the headlines.
I feel like I am just shy of tinfoil hat territory but it's not the craziest thing I have ever though of.
[1]: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/centralparkfive/ [2]: http://www.mtv.com/news/2914420/white-conspiracy-black-histo...
Why join at all if Silicon Valley and core tech jobs have competitive pay? What's the justification given equal hours of work/effort put on both sides.
Tower Research Capital
Hudson River Trading
Jump Trading LLC
Note that these firms are typically considerably more difficult to get an offer at than Google, FB, etc.
The point is - is it the same story for a developer working for a bank, whose bosses' boss presumably is more old-school and wouldn't be keen on hippie engineers wandering in and out of the office whenever they please?
[0] - I worked @ a BB IB
1. That's not respect.
2. You can't assign a monetary value to respect, unless you're willing to sell yourself out.
Many of the senior traders have mediocre academic backgrounds and no marketable skills outside of finance. Plus, they're stressed out all the time. The assholes among them will take out daily frustrations on junior employees, IT guys, and quant strategists that don't run their own risk. Lost five million today? Solution: Go red in the face and loudly berate the kid who developed your pricing model for something that isn't his fault.
This is part of life at a bank. Nobody wants to admit it here because the guys here who work at BBs are generally on the receiving end of the abuse.
It is not unusual to see a math PhD, who is a vice president and writes code for a living, get a very public reaming from an executive director (one rank higher) who drank his way through a bachelor's program at a lesser Ivy.
Bosses don't do anything about it because they don't care and because they are beneficiaries of the pecking order. Subordinates don't do anything about it because they don't want to risk their bonus numbers.
I worked for Salomon Brothers in the mid-late 90's, and they treated developers extremely well. Us backoffice guys got extraordinarily good facilities/equipment, humane working hours, a lot of freedom in tech use, etc. All for above average pay, even for NY.
The trader support devs I worked around and with had it a little bit differently; their processes were much more reactive than ours, they worked under enormous pressure, and there was a lot of "less than cordial" interaction with the traders. However, they got paid quite extraordinarily, and there were never grudges held after the trading day; you could get screamed at for a few hours and go out for refreshments with the same guys a couple hours later. It was a dynamic that you had to have a certain personality to be able to handle, but no one went in there not knowing that.
Just a data point.
working at GS, I definitely got a little bit of the feeling of being somewhat of a second class citizen, and have many former colleagues that felt the same thing. I don't say this in a complaining kind of way, more that just my job as a technologist was supporting 'the business', rather than technology being our business.
HFT != Banks, Hedge Funds != Proprietary Trading Firm (aka prop shops). They are all in Finance and all could be considered "Wall Street" firms.
Your feeling is akin to thinking the mean annual compensation of all of IT (including software architects in Finance) is the median salary of Junior Windows Administrators :)
Source: I've worked in HFT for the past 10ish years and currently work for one of the larger futures trading firms in the US by volume.
Sure, JP Morgan probably isn't in either of those categories.
Nowadays you're supporting a 10 year old inbred system trying to implement some new regulatory project. No root access, often no access to production, github blocked at the firewall, 4 releases a year, half the staff in India.
Plus wages are lower than 10 years ago
Yeah Wall St was great. Not so much any more.
No wonder their attrition is so high. Apparently they are incapable of observing the fact they are just an awful place to work, and instead of fixing that, they just shovel more developers into their meat grinder.
As a co-founder of the site, I wonder if he has any data to back that up.
Numbers can vary, but based on what I see, after 5-6 years of relevant experience, there's no difference between graduate of Top_20 and of noname college.
Financial institutions traditionally coveted graduates from Stanford and other big-name schools and people already working in Silicon Valley.
e.g. Ask people to print numbers from 1 to 10. Then kick the 20% of applicants who couldn't do that :D
Source: I had to correct a batch of HackerRank tests for one company.
What a silly puff piece for JP Morgan and the 'coding bootcamp' puppy farms.
Wonder if salary and time off is worth a redive in.
I see your problem right there.
Come up with something better than link bait guys.