Citigroup plans to hire 4k tech staff
businesstimes.com.sg
businesstimes.com.sg
- They claimed remote was impossible, after I told them it was a red line there was suddenly an exception. They did claim this exception required a lot of approvals but take from that what you will.
- The projects they wanted me to work on were genuinely ambitious and impactful, not just something thankless.
- They claimed to want to start open sourcing large parts of their tech from 2023 onwards.
- It's definitely a different world from the rest of tech, people seemed to care about the things they worked on, but the way things were reasoned about just seemed a bit different.
- The people I met there are genuinely nice people (at least in Tech) who I'd be happy to sit down and have a coffee with anytime.
- Even the very specifically designated tech places had debt coming in from the rest of the company (primarily in process when they had to touch other teams), they did say they had C-Suite buy-in to go solve that but as I didn't join I can't comment on how strong that buy in really is.
- Politics is everywhere, people will fight you not on technical merit but because they want to claim responsibility for something even if its inferior to the product you could build - if you don't have the support to push through this I suspect you'd get stuck here.
- Corporate structure is confusing because everyone's titles are massively inflated.
- Claimed to have internal open source in the Division I interviewed for (didn't expect that).
- Offer for 2 YoE UK was VP £190k/year with no stock
Politics is everywhere, people will fight you not on technical merit
but because they want to claim responsibility for something even
if its inferior to the product you could build - if you don't
have the support to push through this I suspect you'd get stuck here.
Another shining moment was when the security/compliance department cobbled together a Hashicorp Vault proof-of-concept and lobbed it over the fence at one of the ops teams. The ops team didn't have the bandwidth to deal with it and the security team refused to maintain it. It was ridiculous enough that veeps and directors got involved.
Corporate structure is confusing because everyone's titles are massively inflated.
Claimed to have internal open source in the Division I interviewed for (didn't expect that).
Yes I have seen this. This person was boasting about being a "Vice President" and then I see almost everyone is a VP. What is up with this?
One FAANG hiring manager outright told me he found it very intimidating.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/nab-to-innersource-some-of-it....
I have seen this twice now. Vault is trivial to get going and get a POC up, but it is a lot more work (ten times?), getting up properly deployed with working HA, a good structure and good processes in place so it does not become a steaming pile of spaghetti. I probably wrecked my career at one firm spending all the time doing it properly, but it was probably time to leave when they started a project to replace it with Password Manager Pro. :)
I think we ended up using KMS instead (much to the chagrin of everyone).
This sounds higher than Google UK?
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
If the title communicates incorrect information it isn’t merely a different convention; it actively causes confusion.
I’ve also heard that at least at some point the title “vice president” carried some form of regulatory meaning and was the minimum level required for sign off on some pretty basic things, but I’m having trouble confirming that and it may be wrong.
I have heard the same, although phrased as ‘the lowest position where someone is allowed to speak for the company’.
But it doesn't mean it's not title inflation just because there's a reason for it
Director is typically above Vice President in financial firms. I’m not sure I follow your reasoning.
Director = high level manager (of other managers)
“Senior Engineer” with 4 years experience.
Big west coast tech companies do seem to reserve VP for a select few. As they start to mature and their equity driven compensation gives way I’d be surprised if they don’t start to inflate titles as well.
I suspect golden stuff on CV / strong interview round. (I'm now a Staff Engineer on 2.5 YoE)
From what I have read Staff Engineer is mostly architecture/meetings/people management, and being across a very large team. If you are doing that it might be Staff Engineer, but if you are mostly coding it probably isn't.
Either way it doesn't matter. It is just another title.
Imagine Citi’s customer talk to their VP!
In any case though, that comp seems pretty typical nowadays, folks I know at Apple are on 250k and that's considered normal.
As in UK based Apple employees?
5 years back you would only get to that level as a massively prolific contractor. Maybe I should move back to the UK! :)
If you told me 190k for a senior role I'd totally buy that.
The pressure on them is quite high. I'm not sure I'd like to work for Apple.
If I got offered a job, I'd add smooth scrolling and SGR 53 support to Terminal.app and quit immediately after it's released.
Maybe fix text colors beyond what xterm256 offers.
I see Citi do not post salaries on their job adverts, so we can't comparison shop.
If you want to check what I've written for my experience my LinkedIn has it: https://www.linkedin.com/in/intunderflow
Main differences were:
- There was no interview, I spoke to a Director for 15 minutes who happened to be visiting a professor I knew at University (sheer luck/fluke).
- Building a team of full time employees as an intern is pretty unusual. That team went on after my internship.
- Really open-ended (I was just dropped into the Data Science team and told "do something useful").
If you pay people far above their value add, most would consider that unfair, and vice versa for being underpaid.
I don't think we should consider people being underpaid or overpaid as being just in a moral sense. Obviously everybody would prefer to be overpaid for themselves.
Of course high comp in tech is more a function of supply/demand of labor, and the industry still being new. It won't be this way in 20-30 years, as people continue to trickle in and correct the supply imbalance
But the company in the end is a result of the aggregation of all current and past employee input
Except demand has continued to expand, and I believe it will keep expanding. Salaries are high because of what technology can do for a company. Your type of argument has been made since I started writing software in the 90s. All that's happened since then is software has relentlessly eaten every other industry.
The classic widget selling company had material input costs, labor costs, delivery, etc... for many companies now the marginal cost of adding the next customer is almost zero with the primary input cost being labor.
Salaries can certainly be a bit high right now while also staying on a long term trend where tech salaries outpace other careers.
Higher level abstractions = less labor required (e.g. serverless), plus additional supply of labor = lower costs.
Wages are always defined by the equilibrium point between supply and demand of labor, never by the value add of the job.
Simple thought experiment, say you have a button that makes you $1m dollars every time it's pressed and it can be pressed only 100 times per day.
How much do you have to pay somebody to convince them to press it each day?
Now say you have the same button but only 1 person in the world can activate it. How much do you have to pay them to convince them to do it?
The answer to these demonstrates the principle in quite an obvious way.
I've been hearing this about new technologies also since the 90s - going to make programmers obsolete/need less programmers. What ends up happening is what's required expands. I'm sure there's some quippy law here.
> Wages are always defined by the equilibrium point between supply and demand of labor, never by the value add of the job.
Your analogy is only focused supply while keeping a fixed demand. In fact, 'value' drives demand. The reason why demand keeps outpacing supply is the value of technology is enormous.
Will the demand side eventually slow? On a long enough timescale I have to say yes, but a lot of people have gone broke betting against the pace of technology.
We used to have manual QA now most of the testing is done via automation, there used to sys admins handling all the servers now its all cloud which can be handled by programmers/dev ops people.
Maybe in the future we will have code as a service where most of the code is written automatically while few programmers oversee it.
I’ve found that abstraction doesn’t scale with Business Logic. Abstraction is good, absolutely, but the sheer number of strange edge cases, special processing rules, and “the client refuses to change their process whatsoever” only seems to increase.
I sense this is why programs keep growing in scope despite all the wonderful Dev-tools, abstractions, and platforms we now have.
Also when you consider something like Docusign, you can have a pretty much feature complete product that requires little labor to maintain. You can always expand the scope of any product, but we started from 0 with web based/app software just a decade or two ago. Much of the common and widely useful programs will be largely perfected and require less active development as the years go by.
Same thing with github. You can continue to add features, but the core value of the product is already written and in a serverless world, with appropriate automation, can be maintained by a small team.
I really don't understand how somebody can think labor needs in software will never contract... the main point of debate should be on what a realistic timeline is.
high level positions would require the same training and experience they do now with full stack added to them.
like conveyor belt work becomes checking widgets for defects managers busy themselves with maintaining code. The code will grow endlessly creating more work than doing it by hand.
the company db has a crazy amount of data that you will need to be able to query to be able to develop new insights. if it turns out to be useful you wrap it into the software or a separate app
eventually you want the video data in the db with all the machine learning trimmings.
there is no end to this but we wil fail to train people to the desired level
Chase and Citigroup are like the McDonalds of financial services, everyone works there once, the talented people leave, the ones who stay generally lack the confidence or ability to do likewise, and they are a PITA to work for because they live in constant fear of being out shown. I really wouldn’t recommend working at any of the big banks, they are thankless soul crushing jobs, and you’ll forever be working on what everyone else was doing ten years ago.
Thanks, this explains the experience I had interviewing with Chase.
I have never ghosted an entire company before, let alone walked into a bank branch to tell them to get their computer doctors to learn to be respectful in a job interview.
On my end, I'd hoped it might be a cultural fit since I think many big tech companies have insider threats because they don't allow people to truly take time off -- it's common in the finance world to force someone to take a vacation at least once a year for fraud prevention.
(The idea being your scam requires your constant presence, it will fall apart.)
To drive this point home, they're creating a whole new business based on the expertise they developed with Snowflake.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/martingiles/2022/06/01/capitsl-...
This. I've spend over 20 years working in banks. DB, BAML, UBS, Barclays, BNPP to name a few.
They all suck for good tech.
In the 90s and 00s it was a cool place to go. Cash was flowing, algo trading was the new hotness, everyone was making good money and building cool shit.
Post 2008 crisis that all went to hell. No more cool shit, only regulatory knee jerk bolt-ons, turd polishing, and budget cuts.
It's never really got any better since then.
If that's just salary - I have no idea what Citi are doing, it's way out of market.
200k is roughly ICT4 at Apple Ldn which is like 10 years of experience. GP definitely an outlier. Maybe their profile fits a narrative that the bank is pushing.
Ibd = investment banking division
Ict4 = more commonly IC, individual contributor level 4. Not a manager.
Ldn = London I think
Gp = grandparent poster (comment 2 levels above the referenced comment)
My background is enterprise, finance. I talk to enterprises frequently. Question this as hard as you can. They will never act like Google, Facebook, Netflix. In short: don't work for the OS side of enterprises. There is none.
"large parts" - which? In corporate "large parts" is different from tech people.
"from 2023..." - well, this tale is a running gag at least at my company. Telling this since 2017: "Next year!" There are a lot of processes involved, finance fears of losing intellectual property, decision makers are usually business people who know next to nothing about tech people thinking and reasoning.
Banks fear of code injections, have to deal with regulators, don't want to deal with an OS community, because costs - that's my experience. Ask them about these topics and you can sense how realistic these claims are.
Enterprises are slow, they have high inertia for many reasons and tech can only affect that so much.
However, I wouldn’t go back to an IB if I could avoid it. Fundamentally tech is just a cost centre and they have very top-down corporate cultures. Everything is intensely political.
Looking at the data, that salary is a massive outlier, and I know SVP salaries at Citi aren’t at 190 for technologists.
No product ever came of it and others left early from good salaries due to the endless political infighting that handcuffed the entire thing.
Same thing happened again more recently with a company that has to remain nameless
I'm not saying every opportunity in institutional fintech is like this but initial appearance and promises are easily wiped away once middle management get a smell of it, far more so than in other industries.
I work for a different financial company that said something similar about contributing to open source. That was 10 years ago and still nothing. So take this skeptically.
"Politics is everywhere, people will fight you not on technical merit but because they want to claim responsibility for something even if its inferior to the product you could build - if you don't have the support to push through this I suspect you'd get stuck here.
Corporate structure is confusing because everyone's titles are massively inflated."
This is also true at my company.
I'm assuming you have a PhD and this was a quant role?
Ok... I was hired as a DevOps expert by a bank. They had this "user friendly" click-click platform nobody was actually using for automation. I mean, they were trying, but there's a reason modern stuff is Configuration as Code.
I wanted to use Jenkins and a bunch of Python scripts.
The local "tech expert" shot that down, told me that Jenkins was for "builds". I was like, ok, in that case let's use something else to trigger the launch of the scripts. While that was in the pipeline, I started working on the Python scripts.
I worked a bit on them, got them working form my workstation. Then during the "review", I was asked which version they were. I said, Python 3. Nope, the servers only have Python 2. Ok, I'll make them backwards compatible. Finished that, then I was told that we can't run unapproved Python scripts (!!!).
At that point I figured, you know what, what if I write just some local automation to cut down on my tedium, and maybe I share the scripts with the team later on.
I asked what I could use for sure, and they told me: whatever I had pre-installed on the workstation.
So I wrote a bunch Powershell scripts that controlled the IO of plink.exe (SSH client bundled with PuTTY) to send shell commands to servers. I basically reinvented a dumb version of Python fabric...
And I programmed that using Vim bundled with Git Bash, because that was the only decent "simple" editor that I had access to (actual devs were only using company sanctioned Java IDEs with limited plugins allowed, i.e. Eclipse).
My scripts ran well, but when it came around to sharing them with the team, I was basically told that it would be more prudent to keep my head down and let people do what they'd always been doing (i.e. deploying manually...).
I left shortly after that.
And for the official solution, I kid you not, they had me fill in a huge Excel spreadsheet, print it, have my manager sign it, then attach the PDF scan to another Excel I was supposed to email.
And that was for a review by the architects team. One step out of tens of super similar steps (including the print and scan part).
I presented my project as a small, "skunkworks project", to try to get approval on the side of the main solution, to have some automation so I wouldn't go crazy.
If they were better organized and frankly less political, I would have tried to help them more. But at every step the impression was that they didn't want me there, I was a troublemaker...
On the other hand, your HN peers won’t look down on your cereal-bowl ad-targeting (granted, fabulously compensated) gig at Google.
Banks an Insurance have just really bad marketing, but fraud-detection (aka ML.."AI"), analytics..it's all really interesting, and if you have a good manager who shields you from the internal-wannabe-politicians you can produce software that you can be really proud of (enough time to test/plan etc).
And hell, Mainframes are such a interesting field no one talks about (but one could learn some really good lessons).
Unfortunately it's hard to find out in interviews if your manager is worth their salt.
As a former bulge bracket investment bank software developer, I certainly did not make anywhere close to insane amounts of money. As a "vice president" 10+yoe senior SWE equivalent my TC was probably a tad bit higher than the higher end of a FAANG junior SWE TC. This is in NYC. Ditto for my colleagues.
The only kind of SWE I can see making great money at a bank are those working in the algo trading and maybe the quant space, but those are highly niche roles.
On the other hand I know someone who is a DBA. A few years ago she decided to switch to a bank, and the work-life balance is much better than any other company she has worked for. This year they let her work remotely from another EU country for 3 months.
Bear in mind that most of the people there won’t actually realise that they’re low skill level. In fact, they probably think they’re high skill level because they’re working in a bank and banks are elite, right? That is a toxic combination.
So actually you spend much of your time fending off requests to change your work in stupid ways or making futile attempts to avoid the codebase turning into spaghetti code.
It’s not the case that you can just turn in two hours’ code and everyone’s happy with your day’s achievement.
It is exhausting to have to argue the case for every minimal piece of good software design (eg validating inputs, designing minimal interfaces, avoiding god classes).
Eventually you give up and/or they think you’re stupid because you find their spaghetti code hard to understand. The app becomes increasingly slow, hard to maintain and full of weird bugs. Everyone wonders how this could have happened and the rewrite begins.
Over last two years I had to work with few people who worked in banking as C# developers, they all had 8-12 years of experience and they wrote worst, most outdated, unreadable and untestable spaghetti code I've ever seen. First week on the job I've added StyleCop to all our projects because I just couldn't stand people being unable to press one shortcut to format their own code(or install an extension to do that for them). This way it wasn't me pointing out ugly code, it was the pipeline, 'pls fix'.
Obviously there are people and people, but so far I've only noticed that developers who worked in banking institutions usually have a lot of experience in that one or two particular companies and they barely can do anything of value on their own.
I did a small stint at a mid tier bank and this is exactly how it went. You try to advocate for better methods and you constantly hit inertia and a deep institutional belief in years of service.
"You use git? Interesting but our director (15 YOE) says it's a waste of time. Do you claim you know more than him? You've only just started here!"
In the end you could easily do the assigned work in 10h a week except you are hobbled by bad practices, poor infrastructure, cheap leadership (you want an IDE? our division didn't approve the expense) and so so much Legacy code.
So don't do that. It's rarely worth it. I'm happy to bill $150 an hour while a couple of colleagues argue vehemently about directory structures on S3.
If you care that much about every minimal aspect of software design, then you need your own personal project. Landing on a team that all have the same good sense about software development with the ability to express that is just pure luck.
But it's still tiring to see code being merged and thinking "that's going to make X, Y and Z harder for me to do". Or being asked/told to make bad changes. Or being the one who has to do the emergency fix for the non-null assertions causing runtime exceptions in prod (which you had flagged in review and been told "the compiler is wrong, we know they can't be null").
Person 1 says there is a lot of politics, ass-covering, and throwing under the bus
Persons 2 and 3 says back in the 80s and 90s there were a lot of exciting projects, but now it's all maintenance work and making sure money train does not stop.
Person 4 says at his company they tracked how much money your bugs cost the firm, and at the end of the year if that number is too high, you're fired.
Person 5 corroborates what Person 4 said, adding that no one is allowed to touch production -- you touch production and you might cause an outage in some part of the company you never heard of, next thing that happens is Security shows up at your desk with cardboard boxes telling you to pack your stuff.
Person 6 says for the same reasons no one is allowed to touch the base classes you inherit from -- people just make their own copy of the base class and make their changes to it. The code base is littered with many copies of the same file each different in its own way.
Person 7 flat out told me "you are too nice, you will get eaten alive at a financial services firm"
Person 8 says he was not allowed to talk to or collaborate with a colleague because they worked for competing managers, they had to leave the office to collaborate
As someone who almost never ships a bug but is a bit slower because of that, I would love it ;)
Very few of my tickets are directly from programming mistakes, but I do own up to them when they happen.
> Person 1 says there is a lot of politics, ass-covering, and throwing under the bus
It sounds like you have to be good at politicking or it doesn't matter if you write bugs or not :(
Thank you. c:
At the end of the day it's all anecdote, but the plural of anecdote can be opinion even if it's not data.
The cost center heuristic is good: is the work you're doing an important part of a product being sold? If not, you're just a cost like office cleaning, and will be treated and paid accordingly.
Apart from banking (process-driven, often boring, can be well paid) the other big stereotypes are consultancy ("body shop": cheap and nasty; higher end consultancy can be hugely lucrative but very political) and games (almost uniformly appalling, only work for a games company if you really want to be able to tell your friends you do so)
Anyways I personally wouldn't be able to work in a place where software is not their core business.
"Citi currently has more than 30,000 software engineers."
It's not glamorous or pays as well as SV startups/unicorns but it's out there and accounts for most of the worlds software.
Which seems pretty smelly to me from the outside.
But, even worse, it's a bank.
The economy also isn't a monolith, different sectors grow and shrink differently. The interest rates were so low that VC was way more attractive, but as rates tick up more traditional banking products will likely become more attractive. Banks took a beating in 2008, because it was bad bank policy that crashed the market, that isn't the case this time.
Might apply here...