Banks vs Startups: The Tech Talent War heats up | Hacker News Reader

Banks vs Startups: The Tech Talent War heats up

blog.coderstack.co.uk

30 pointsig112 comments

In my experience, banks need a lot more than competitive job postings to be places where talented developers want to go. Obviously YMMV, but it's red-tape hell, technologically dated, management heavy, non-creative, and a real daily grind. If it's the kind of job you want, you are much better off working for the Government.

This is exactly what working for a bank IS NOT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

I couldn't agree more, I don't really share the - what I think is - meaningless view of the world that banks have. There are ways to make money and helping people be awesome at the same time.

Finance is pretty much like any sector, there's a huge variety between firms and even between individual teams within firms.

There are lots of areas of finance where technology is what provides the competitive edge and they tend to be much more agile and use recent technologies, but there are also lots of areas where the code that was written 20 years ago in Fortran still works perfectly fine and does the job.

My understanding of technology as a competitive edge in finance is that:

1 - it's a relatively small part of the sector

2 - it happens in intervals

Specifically for #2, you can look at flash trading, where the edge exists for a while, but then everyone more or less catches up..and it's a couple years before the next innovation.

Some other complaints: -Bank incentives are almost purely monetary (which does not work). -They tend to hire within the industry (it's an extreme place to find technical and managerial inbreeding). -They are extremely arrogant and prideful (making corrective measures hard to implement, since they aren't identified)

It's actually much broader than just flash trading, essentially you can divide it by which part of the bank it occurs in. Any front office tech (risk management, pricing, analytics, trading) app tends to be on the competitive edge as does anything it relies upon (infrastructure, feeds, tick databases, etc.)

Back-office technology (settlement, reconciliation, etc.) tends to move much slower.

It also depends on the asset class, more stagnant areas such a mortgages tend to have more stagnant codebases than "hot" areas like FX.

Competitive areas aren't the same across all firms either, while one firm might put a lot of money into it analytics technology another might ignore that area altogether and just buy in an off-the-shelf solution accepting that it's not going to compete in that area.

Essentially the only way you'll know about the quality of the tech you'll be working with is to be smart and ask questions at the interview stage (this is true for any firm).

> Essentially the only way you'll know about the quality of the tech you'll be working with is to be smart and ask questions at the interview stage (this is true for any firm).

Cannot emphasise how important this is. No one discusses how to navigate an interview from the perspective of a potential employee.

It's also a huge amount of money.

In London, which obviously is much more of a financial hub than a technological one, the highest paid jobs for programmers are almost all in the financial industry.

Personally, I'd prefer to do something more interesting for less money, but that doesn't mean that it's not tempting.

> - A PhD or MEng in Computer Science.

If this isn't for a research-orientated position or a very technical (mathematical) role - in which case, you probably want that to read PhD or MEng in Maths or Physics - then why bother with this particular bit of criteria? Since when does having a PhD or MEng make you a better software developer?

It's probably just a way of saying that they need more math and data mining skills than your average software engineer with a BS or no degree at all.

Can you really be a Software Engineer without a degree? Developer, yes, but the term "engineer" has a certain level of professionalism associated with it that an autodidact computer programmer wouldn't necessarily have.

For point of reference, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring#The_Ritual_of_the_Cal...

> It is a symbol that reflects the moral, ethical and professional commitment made by the engineer who wears the ring.

I'm not an engineer myself and I wouldn't presume to call myself one unless I'd gone through the engineering training.

Am I being too pedantic?

Well, we take (I took) a 'Computers and Society' class, where we talked about the consequences, morality + responsibilities of S.E.. Other than that it was just a bunch of programming etc classes. If you want that 'certified' feeling, maybe find a local school where that course is offered, take it, and then join the ACM.

I'm going to go with yes you are being too pedantic. No one really knows what to call programmers so we make up things to say. I write code for my company so I'm the guy who makes things happen to some and to others I perform some sort of dark arts.

I'm pretty good at making things work and bringing a lot of knowledge to any situation requiring my skills.

Does that make me an engineer? Does my lack of degree disqualify me?

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