11k Citi employees fired. Help get them hired in tech.

Banks are a hard place to work in IT. But the pay is good. In New York, I've seen a lot of good engineers get sucked in. I worked as a consultant at Citi for a year.

I wouldn't quite write someone off because they worked at a bank. It can be hard to walk away from 33% of your salary to do something more fulfilling. Just because they exist in that environment doesn't mean their passion is dead.

EDIT: By the way, I work at a Silicon Valley engineering driven startup working to fix financial software. If you have passion and want to start solving the problem rather than contribute to it, we're hiring great engineers. I know there are some in the big banks. http://careers.addepar.com or R2@addepar.com

I have kind of mixed feelings about this. I worked at Citi, and the average person there is actually pretty smart. They're just tied down by all the bureaucracy, which ends up killing their creativity and motivation.

This can turn into an advantage once you leave, though. Once you join a decent company you get very motivated to do your best, because you never want to go back.

Thank you! We're offering this course as a way for talent to level up.

As to the potential in the talent pool, you're judging people on the wrong factors: Big banks may not have the slick interfaces of a Square or Simple, but they also have the most complex, least-error tolerant customers and regulators.

Banking functions without downtime, and the world in which does so is extraordinarily complex. Ignoring either of those when you discuss the potential of the people that make it work is silly.

I work with a great dba who came from a bank.

One fun fact about working in banking: customarily you're required to take at least 10 consecutive days off every year.

Speaking as someone in a very similar (if not worse) kind of environment (feral employees, uncivil servants), I think you'd be surprised. Sure, most people at Citi (and where I work) are probably very risk averse, but that doesn't mean they don't have smarts. I've often felt that there is an enormous untapped talent pool at many of the national labs. A change to something fresher might be just the push some people need to go guerilla and try a startup. Heck, if I wasn't tied down by local personal interests, I'd have jumped ship long ago.

If the prognostications of a 2013 Flight to Substance following the implosion of social media are correct, enterprise startups will be increasingly popular. However, the enterprise is a notoriously hard place to sell. But someone needs to do it. Who better than someone who was in the enterprise for 5 years?

Also, don't stereotype. There are a lot of IT people in banks and stereotypically boring financial companies like Bloomberg and Reuters who think the way HNers do, who would love to torch their 1980s-era version control systems in favor of Git, and who spend half their time on Coursera boning up on machine learning.

It might be that no-one in NYC was fired. But I imagine that the people employed by Citi in the city (zing) are still a little nervous about their long-term prospects. When shareholders cheer people being fired, you have to wonder if you're next.

That said, it does make Thinkful's offer to "ex-Citi employees" a little less likely to be taken up.

Awesome. Were you recently laid off?

What did you like about it?

Excellent question.

Simply put: We follow where growing companies are looking for talent. That's our indicator.

Banks, hedge funds and other parts of the financial sector use a hell of a lot of fancy tech (they're the first "big data" after all), and there's a lot of expertise that's been locked up there for too long.

When I left finance (4.5 years, 4 years ago... hells yeah) I had all sorts of engineering skills, but knew nothing of the companies, how to evaluate employers, or what exact tools were most in demand or growing.

Helping people answer those questions more quickly than I could is our mission.

Nothing wrong with learning Javascript and Ruby or Python off the bat instead of starting with something like Java or C/C++. But you might want to start the course with stuff like programming language basics, database basics, and SQL if they're coming from non-programming positions.

It's also a little overkill to cover Django, Rails, AND Node.js in one course, isn't it?

I guess I'm not sure if the ad is targeted at Citigroup's software/IT people (who already know a lot of this stuff and are probably not the folks getting laid off) or the other (finance/accounting/admin/sales/customer service/operations) people (who probably need to start from the square-one basics of web programming).

I would add regular expressions and anonymous functions to that list.