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Comment by sturadnidge | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of sounding like a heartless bastard upholding tired old stereotypes, enterprise scale retail banking is probably the last place the majority of startups should consider a 'talent pool'. In places like Citi, change is something to be feared, silos are everywhere and 'lean' is probably unheard of (at least in IT circles).

Kudos for at least providing an opportunity for people to improve themselves though. And the sentiment of course.

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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.

Agreed. Finance trains you extremely well for many challenges. Sometimes it's bureaucracy and that has to be untrained :).

some of the best devs I know loved the challenge that banking software presented. However, the majority of them could only handle a few years of it before needing fresh air

But would the 11k laid off be average employees, or the bottom 5%?

The smartest people will often end up performing terribly at bad companies. Being unable to act is not a huge deal for an average person, but it can be devastating and demotivating for someone who's used to getting shit done.

And honestly? I don't believe Citi management knows enough to know who their bottom 5% are.

You nailed it outright. I award an Indignation for your this post. I will also award one to Thinkful for this brilliant marketing move. So it's a Joint Indignation I award today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtCiP8B2xpc#t=7s

If 100 is the typical productivity of a smart person when she's making the technical calls, picking the tools, and writing a new system, most corporate environments expect software engineers to function at 5-10-- maybe 20-30 when they get to senior dev roles. The problem is that if you're used to 100+, that feels like being at 0. It's demoralizing when your productivity is a rounding error for environmental reasons that aren't your fault.

With such comprehensive layoffs (4% of the company), I can't imagine they wiped out 80% of their bottom 5%.

Welch effect: people first to be laid off are junior members of macroscopically underperforming teams, who had the least to do with its underperformance because they were not influential on those teams.

(I named it for Jack Welch, father of rank-and-yank.)

Consequently, companies tend to lay off from the middle, not bottom.

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 totally agree, I consider myself in that category. Although to be fair I'm in IB, not retail.

Any exit plan yet? I'm in the same boat.

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.

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.

You don't see the contradiction in your post? Startups arent fresh air and flowers, the ones that succeed are the ones that power through the tough times for uncertain reward. You need to love the thrill of the risk in and of itself.

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.

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.

As you may know, the mandatory consecutive days of vacation time isn't due to the kindness of their heart. Instead, it's an audit control. The idea is that if you are forced to stay away from work for some amount of time, it's harder to cover up fraud or other unscrupulous activity. Many companies have a similar policy, although it's typically a week of consecutive days off.

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