Second Contract In Finance - My Thoughts

[DeludedAussie]

I ve been in finance for >5 years and have been contracting for 1 year and three months at a tier 1 bank

What surprises me the most is the quality of people and the state of the systems.

The people are generally indian contractors with poor communication skills and incompetent managers

The systems are awful with files and batch jobs all over the place

How do such 'smart and talented' people make such a mess - Its a skill in its own right

[scooterscot]

Must be a London thing.

Anything that increases profit is good, policy and procedures went out the window long time ago.

[Paddy]

I ve been in finance for >5 years and have been contracting for 1 year and three months at a tier 1 bank

What surprises me the most is the quality of people and the state of the systems.

The people are generally indian contractors with poor communication skills and incompetent managers

The systems are awful with files and batch jobs all over the place

How do such 'smart and talented' people make such a mess - Its a skill in its own right

I agree with what you say and in my experience I would also add incompetent Aussie contractors (you maybe an exception). Often Aussies come to the UK for a year, make their money and run back before they pay their taxes. I have even known them to run up large debts just before they go back home.

[Sysman]

The systems are awful with files and batch jobs all over the place

Yup, banks do have lots of files and batch jobs. A lot of stuff is triggered by incoming file transfers, which kind of makes them a necessity. Batch jobs are actually pretty good for auditing purposes.

They don't need to be "all over the place" though.

[swamp]

I've never worked for a bank, but from what I've heard half of them seem to be run on Excel spreadsheets.

[northernladuk]

What surprises me the most is the quality of people and the state of the systems.

Have you read back on some of your own posts?? Kettles and pots here.

[Moscow Mule]

I've been working in and around finance for over 10 years.

I have to say that the quality of employees and contractors has varied greatly from absolute legend to complete drongo.

To be honest, I've met more at the upper end of the scale than the lower end, but I don't spend much time in T1 banks. I guess there's more room to hide in a T1 bank.

[minestrone]

Been in about 8 financial, 4 banks.

The worst was the T1. They had a massive trading system that relied upon the trading date (as you would expect) the program would rely on a table for this info and every night a cron job would run to push the next date on, the cron job would always get mucked about with as they were on another box and it was chaos, The batch jobs would all kick off spitting out yesterday's figures, the roll back scripts were massive, as big as the scripts to do the job in the first place.

If only the developer that wrote this area had understood java.util.GregorianCalendar and the one line he needed he would have saved the bank millions.

The best bit was that the cron job called Perl script that called a URL on the server which called a Perl script which then called the stored proc to do the batch and the 'dateRollOver' script.

If I ever get to meet that developer I must thank him, probably made 200,000 off his one 'mistake'.

[minestrone]

Actually, that internet bank with 2 letters managed to get a 30 odd page site into 15 million lines of code and then they still relied upon the parent bank's core systems.

[oversteer]

I never realised before this thread, even at the big banks, it's all cron jobs, batch processing and "oh ****" rollback scripts? I'd have imagined something a lot better.