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I did a job interview at Citibank a number of years ago, for an IT security position, and the thing I remember most was walking through the office and seeing a well used copy of Computer Security For Dummies on every desk. That reminded me of a past position at Chase where our group’s head of IT security was a former bricklayer, with no technical background, who was never without his copy of Computer Security for Dummies, and was forever trying to find out where we were “hiding our NFS”. We always tried to tell him that we didn’t use NFS and he would always counter that he didn’t buy it, and he knew we had one and that we were hiding it from him. Ok.

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.

>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

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.)

I will say, having worked at Capital one in the past, that it is the outlier here. They have a really strong tech focused culture and from my experience, rarely outsource their tech teams.

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-...

> you’ll forever be working on what everyone else was doing ten years ago.

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.

> They claimed to want to start open sourcing large parts of their tech from 2023 onwards.

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.

I'm in enterprise, insurance industry. Our witticism for future functionality is "Any decade now!"

Enterprises are slow, they have high inertia for many reasons and tech can only affect that so much.

I don’t know if it is the case with Citi, but it may not be that titles are inflated, but that titles are different. I’ve spent most of my career on Wall Street (i-banking and investing) and VP is a mid level position, and it comes before director. Whereas my mom works for Google and VPs there are quite senior.

This is right. It’s just different, not inflated.

ISTM the definition of title inflation should be something like “titles frequently connote a significantly higher level of responsibility than the title holder actually has”.

If the title communicates incorrect information it isn’t merely a different convention; it actively causes confusion.

If having thousands of vice-presidents is not title inflation, what would qualify as such?

Just that the convention is different. It is just the third rung on the ladder in the finance world. You might manage a small team of junior staff.

You don’t need to manage anyone to be VP. If you manage people you deserve a director title! More than 25% of Goldman Sachs employees are VP, for example. And of course the idea of title inflation can be rendered meaningless in any situation saying “it’s just a different convention”.

It depends on the bank. In some places VPs can manage a lot of people without being promoted to Director.

You’re right. Let me change that to “if you manage a group of VPs you deserve a director title”!

There are historical reasons for the proliferation of the title- every city and town used to have their own bank or several. These were independent businesses, each one having a President and maybe a couple of Vice Presidents. When mergers and acquisitions happened and all these single branch banks got rolled up to mega corps they kept the nomenclature because that’s what people were used to- a manager at a bank branch was a Vice President because that’s what it always meant, but the title then got used for anyone at the same level.

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’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’.

That's the cause of the title inflation

But it doesn't mean it's not title inflation just because there's a reason for it

It's not inflation because the same proportion of staff have that title as they used to (is the claim).

The reason banks have so many Vice Presidents is that to bind a company to a contract, you need to be a corporate officer. A Vice President is a corporate officer but a director isn't. If you want to issue loans, etc, you practically need this authority. If a relatively low level employee in one part of the business is a VP, that creates pressure to make lower level people in other parts of the business VPs also. Some of this may be historical, but this as I understand it is why almost everyone at a bank is a Vice President.

> A Vice President is a corporate officer but a director isn't.

Director is typically above Vice President in financial firms. I’m not sure I follow your reasoning.

Officer = legal responsibility

Director = high level manager (of other managers)

You think that the vice-presidents are officers and the directors above them are not? Do the VPs lose their legal responsibilities and powers when they are promoted?

Directors are also officers, just more senior than VPs.

No, Directors are also corporate officers (and more senior than VPs).

I viewed this more as a quirk of American IB titles rather title inflation. The path has always been Analyst > Associate > VP, and you can make VP in under 5 years.

> what would qualify as such?

“Senior Engineer” with 4 years experience.

For most east cost financial companies VP is usually a mid level position. Many companies talk about VP roles as “senior” and “leadership” positions but then have poor role clarity and organization structures that make everyone in the organization behave 1-3 levels lower than their title suggests. Decisioning at these companies is usually reserved for a higher level of VP, SVP, EVP, etc.

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.

That is a great salary for the UK - did you apply for a UK role, or did you apply for a US role working remotely, and thus got a US-level salary? I'm at the executive director level at another bank and get paid only slightly more than that in the UK - looks like I need to start interviewing.

I'm fairly sure that's total comp - so with a 1st year bonus guarantee. After that first comp cycle, we all know which way the bonus will go...And then you're fighting the rest of the team for that 2-5% merit budget.

If that's just salary - I have no idea what Citi are doing, it's way out of market.

What's crazy is just a few years ago that TC was only available for IBD. Even if the trajectory is only down after the 1st year bonus, you can hop off after the paycheck. Now that money can only be found in tech.

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.

TC, IBD, ICT4, Ldn, GP… I simply can’t parse this comment.

Tc = total compensation (salary, bonus, stock, benefits)

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)

That’s a very good VP level UK salary, at least compared to JPM.

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.

I’d posit that most VPs and some EDs at JPM aren’t on that salary.

Looking at the data, that salary is a massive outlier, and I know SVP salaries at Citi aren’t at 190 for technologists.

It's total comp. So salary plus bonus. It's high but I've seen higher at JPM in terms of total comp at VP level. If we're talking pure salary then yes £190k is base for a seasoned ED.

I guess I'm severely underpaid then....

I know that JPM are trying to compete with the likes of Citadel, so perhaps IBs are increasing their offers for new tech people.

  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.

In my meager experience this is not unusual in large(r) organizations. At one point at megacorp there was a big push to get me to buy into some atrocious docker orchestration thing as I was part of a high velocity team. There were two teams working on this internal monstrosity and each manager was quite happy to promise entirely contradictory things to promote their own status within the company. I've never been so fast to turn someone's name into a verb.

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.

This has been my experience at most tech companies I've been at.

  Claimed to have internal open source in the Division I interviewed for (didn't expect that).

Careful what you ask for. ;)

goes doubly for banking sector. I can't tell you how many 'vice presidents' are in my rolodex, it's pretty much everybody that isn't a teller.

Sure. The first time around at megacorp I left shortly before a reorg that demoted my manager to IC status. He was still a manager when I returned but a manager with no direct reports.

> I can't tell you how many 'vice presidents' are in my rolodex

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?

Suppose you are the CEO of a bottle cap company in the Midwest. Whose call you going to take, a VP at Goldman or a junior banker at Goldman?

Vice President at financial companies is just a mid-senior title. Similar to L4/L5 at Google. There is no expectation of managing people.

My resume and LinkedIn original had "vice president" as my title (as a bank SWE). It seemed to be detrimental to finding a job at a tech company, so I've long since replaced it with just "senior software engineer" to much better results.

One FAANG hiring manager outright told me he found it very intimidating.

One bank in Australia (NAB) is also doing this inner source thing.

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/nab-to-innersource-some-of-it....

> cobbled together a Hashicorp Vault proof-of-concept and lobbed it over the fence at one of the ops teams.

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. :)

This was I think more an issue of integrating it with other bits of infrastructure. Things like access control provisioning namespaces. The folks who were on the receiving end of the security team's bullshit were quite capable of getting vault setup but bogged down by mediocre management.

I think we ended up using KMS instead (much to the chagrin of everyone).

(No offense) We're paying in-experienced new to industry engineers way too much money. Thanks for sharing.

I'm not sure how much can be gleaned about my competency and experience from just YoE (I jokingly refer to it as "bum in seat time" sometimes)

In any case though, that comp seems pretty typical nowadays, folks I know at Apple are on 250k and that's considered normal.

> 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! :)

Yeah, high Senior / low Staff at Apple nets you 250k based on folks I know

Sure 250k is normal, but at a senior level. 2 YoE would never get someone 190k salary (in the UK).That's just nuts.

If you told me 190k for a senior role I'd totally buy that.

OP didn't specify whether that includes bonus or not. Regardless, for 2 YoE, this has to be a huge outlier. I'm inclined to think that this more an exception to the rule - I have a bunch of friends working in London finance tech, none of them making even close to that figure.

> folks I know at Apple are on 250k

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.

Those 3-5 years at Apple could be lucrative for you. Go for it!

No pressure is non-negotiable. I work fine under pressure, but I hate it and will burnout.

2 YoE in what, specifically? I have _20_ years across a whole bunch of software and hardware areas, and would love to know how to get that kind of number.

I see Citi do not post salaries on their job adverts, so we can't comparison shop.

Mostly Go / Kubernetes and some Architecture stuff as well. Main focus has been Security, then Infrastructure.

If you want to check what I've written for my experience my LinkedIn has it: https://www.linkedin.com/in/intunderflow

Interesting. How should I parse "Assistant VP (Internship)" - that sounds like you were an assistant VP and an intern at the same time? Or was that "with responsibility for interns"?

Title didn't mean much at all. Officially I was an Assistant VP on a fixed term contract instead of an Intern, but this was over the traditional internship months and between University years.

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 ask me, no employee has ever been paid too much money for anything ever. It's a job, making money is the whole point, the more the better. No such thing as too much for any level of seniority/responsibilities/skill.

If you pay people more than they produce (across the board), the company fails. That qualifies as too much to me.

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

Company performance is so separated from employee input, and value add is so difficult to measure for most positions that I don't trust this model as a useful guide. It's like an oversimplified model from an outdated econ textbook that has nothing to do with how things work in the real world.

Company performance is exactly defined by employee input from the start. Later on people can coast on input from past employees, sure.

But the company in the end is a result of the aggregation of all current and past employee input

Citibank is well into the "Later on" part then. They have 200k employees and are in a heavily regulated industry, it's not some startup where you can make a meaningful difference with a cool MVP that you developed over the weekend.

> 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

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.

It's inevitable. Just because it takes a long time doesn't mean it won't happen.

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.

> Higher level abstractions = less labor required (e.g. serverless), plus additional supply of labor = lower costs.

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.

> 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.

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.

>” What ends up happening is what's required expands.”

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.

Depends on the business. Bespoke logic maybe, but rules based logic such as tax considerations can be abstracted away by APIs etc. Look at the difference in LOE of starting an ecommerce business in 1999 vs 2022 for example.

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.

i think the opposite might happen. coding would become like reading and writing with every desk job involving code.

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

Being overpaid and underqualified in a job you hate is an intensely sucky place to be in. It's not just about vague morals.

I think OP meant 2 years experience at that senior level based on other comments.

2 years total at time of offer, I'm just coming up on 3 now (a few months away)

> Offer for 2 YoE UK was VP £190k/year with no stock

This sounds higher than Google UK?

Depends wildly on the team / level surely, much more than YoE? I'd have guessed Google/Deepmind can pay anywhere from 80k up through 400k based on the role.

Are you talking about US dollars? The salaries in the UK are much lower.

No that’s definitely consistent with what Google pay in GBP in London.

Google UK pays an L5 which is Senior Software Engineer around 200K GBP including stocks [1]

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

I don’t get how that is inconsistent with the root comment? If the median senior earns 200k, then it’s reasonable that someone junior would earn 80k and a top engineer at DeepMind would earn more.

Wow that is honestly much higher than I was expecting. I was thinking back to Dan Abramov earning half of that at Facebook.

"They claimed to want to start open sourcing large parts of their tech from 2023 onwards."

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 had a job offer like this with grand visions and promises of greenfield freedom, with the goal to compete with someone big in the payments sector who was and has since eaten their lunch, by WorldPay years ago.

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.

Is that your offer (with 2 YoE) or someone else? Is that usual do you think, or do you have some golden stuff on the cv?

This is my offer.

I suspect golden stuff on CV / strong interview round. (I'm now a Staff Engineer on 2.5 YoE)

More power to you, but that sounds like a pretty inflated title to (not staff) me.

Probably is honestly.

I imagine it was HR BS. They had to call you that to pay you X. You are worth X. But they needed to match the title to it.

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.

I think this different (as said by other poster) or inflated title is on purpose. i.e. to get customers trust.

Imagine Citi’s customer talk to their VP!

This is absolutely a technique they use at branches and for customer support calls. The majority of people respond very positively when they think their problem is being handled by a Senior Vice President.

> Offer for 2 YoE UK was VP £190k/year with no stock

I'm assuming you have a PhD and this was a quant role?

BSc and no