Breaking into Banking.. Any tips?

[minestrone]

I've done some shonky stuff when i've been under pressure to get it out. It always comes back to bite you. It's goddam stressful when they can't trade, or cant settle because of your crap code. Fixing it under that sort of pressure seperates the men from the boys. Not a nice environment, far removed from engineering shops.

I actually wrote myself out of a job in IB. Improved a system that failed on a near daily basis, changed the exception handling on a pretty complicated system and 2 months later it was "thanks, we don't need you any more".

I did the work to stop me getting phoned up at 5 in the morning and in the end I got that but not really in the way I wanted.

[Freamon]

I actually wrote myself out of a job in IB. Improved a system that failed on a near daily basis, changed the exception handling on a pretty complicated system and 2 months later it was "thanks, we don't need you any more".

I did the work to stop me getting phoned up at 5 in the morning and in the end I got that but not really in the way I wanted.

Before Lehmans went under, their main trade capture / reconciliation system (for a particular asset class, can't remember which) was run out of a big spreadsheet called SnM.xls. It was called SnM because it was written by two guys called Steve and Mark.

[Ruprect]

Before Lehmans went under, their main trade capture / reconciliation system (for a particular asset class, can't remember which) was run out of a big spreadsheet called SnM.xls. It was called SnM because it was written by two guys called Steve and Mark.

doesn't surprise me. Might explain a thing or two

[Moscow Mule]

Get a crew together, people you can trust, then rent the office space next door to the bank you want to get into.

Over a night, bring in some heavy equipment - low speed drills are best as you don't want to set off the tremble alarms. Once you are through, you'll need somebody who is good with electronics to bypass any alarms before you can make your way into the vault. Then rob all the cash and jewels you can find before scarpering to the Algarve...

[Freamon]

doesn't surprise me. Might explain a thing or two

Apparently they brought in a team of outsiders to help reconcile their front office and back office books, as they were getting further and further apart (to the tune of 10s - 100s of millions that were missing). Said team did a forensic analysis and found a string of poor practices that were causing the discrepancies. As they kept uncovering more and more reasons, Lehmans eventually told them to stop looking for problems, as they had already found too many, and simply paid them to finish up early.

[Gentile]

Wouldn't touch 'em with a barge pole

I concur with the view that investment banks are undesirable places to work, for any type of IT professional, but particularly for contractors. I avoid them like the plague these days, after having had some bad experiences. Not only are their internal systems risible (e.g., I was asked to work on one ASP.Net app that had - wait for it - over 20,000 lines of HTML markup within a single page: it was basically a barely-hanging-together 'application', rolled into one massive, slow-to-load page), but also their internal staff are predominantly arrogant tossers, who try to make like as difficult for you as humanly possible, because they fear that if you’re successful you'll only show them up for their intrinsic incompetence to their management.

On the last contact I did for one such bank, problems started when they wouldn’t allow me to connect my laptop to their systems (could be argued as being fair enough in one respect, but on the other hand why hire an external professional to help you if you’re not going to allow them full access to your systems, thereby preventing them from providing that help?). Anyway, I tried to accommodate the client by suggesting that I put the code I needed to transfer (basically, past projects that contained useful generic solutions to commonly-encountered problems) onto a thumb drive, which I told them they were welcome to check for viruses, etc, and transfer onto their network using their own staff, to satisfy themselves that I was only bringing code into their environment to help them, not taking any code or data away. This wasn’t good enough, however, and their wonderfully far-sighted manager suggested I e-mail any code snippets I needed to send instead. This was impractical, to say the least, since there’s was an intrinsic limit to how much data I could send that way, and because I didn’t have access to an internet connection from within their building (so I’d need to wait until I went home each night to e-mail myself any snippets I’d discovered I needed during the day). Nonetheless, I aim to please, and so I did work in that awkward way, with one hand tied behind my back, all the while wondering at the contradictory behaviour towards other external staff I was seeing, such as one guy who came in to fix their photocopier, who needed to connect his lappy to their systems to downloaded some patches, which didn’t seem to present a problem for them. In addition to the above-mentioned limitations on my access, I, along with every other contractor, was required to work on a PC with only one monitor (whilst their internal staff had two across the board), and wasn’t even assigned a dedicated PC (the one I was using belonged to a guy that was on holiday, and who was to return in two weeks). Contractors were also prohibited from using the internet to access relevant technical articles and code snippets, making our job even more difficult (and, needless to say, this limitation was again not applied to their own staff).

Anyway, in spite of all the problems above, and others that I wont bore you with, I still managed to finish the mini-project I had been assigned within my first three days (said ‘project’ involved adding precisely two fields to a certain part of the One Massive ASP.Net Page application I mentioned earlier, which design requirement one of their ‘business analysts’ had managed to produce a 35-page spec to describe – no, I’m not exaggerating). At the end of that first week, I was told that I was no longer needed, and they reneged on the rest of the three month contract we had agreed to. I was pretty peed off that night, got back looking for work the next day, and within a week was somewhere else, making a better daily rate, and working with a client whose staff resembled the cast of The Office less. I viewed the ‘lost’ revenue of that three month contract with the bank as school fees, and resolved never to waste my time working in that industry sector again. It’s no place to be a developer, or a contractor, and I can only advise anyone considering working there to save themselves the trouble, or to at least bump their rate up by £200 to compensate for the sheer embuggerance of dealing with such utter cretins. Working on IT projects in the IB industry sector is worse than working on them in the Public Sector, and that’s saying something.

[Moscow Mule]

Sounds like some of you have had a tulip time working for banks. I must say that in the last 8 years of contracting on implementation and upgrade projects in and around all sorts of banks, I've met very few dickheads and some quite good friends.

Sure, sometimes it's hard work with long hours but a lot of times it's a complete piece of piss.

[Paddy]

I concur with the view that investment banks are undesirable places to work, for any type of IT professional, but particularly for contractors. I avoid them like the plague these days, ........bla bla bla In addition to the above-mentioned limitations on my access, I, along with every other contractor, was required to work on a PC with only one monitor (whilst their internal staff had two across the board), and wasn’t even assigned a dedicated PC (the one I was using belonged to a guy that was on holiday, and who was to return in two weeks). Contractors were also prohibited from using the internet to access relevant technical articles and code snippets, making our job even more difficult (and, needless to say, this limitation was again not applied to their own staff).

Anyway, in spite of all the problems above, and others that I wont bore you with, I still managed to finish the mini-project I had been assigned within my first three days (said ‘project’ involved adding precisely two fields to a certain part of the One Massive ASP.Net Page application I mentioned earlier, which design requirement one of their ‘business analysts’ had managed to produce a 35-page spec to describe – no, I’m not exaggerating,,,,,,,.... It’s no place to be a developer, or a contractor, and I can only advise anyone considering working there to save themselves the trouble, or to at least bump bla bla bla .

Sounds like JPM’ I had to bypass access to their security system in order to get the project done. The management would not look out of place as barrow boys in an East End market. Max Keiser is right about JPM

[swamp]

...they wouldn’t allow me to connect my laptop to their systems

...

I, along with every other contractor, was required to work on a PC with only one monitor

...

Contractors were also prohibited from using the internet to access relevant technical articles and code snippets, making our job even more difficult

So let us get this straight.

1. You turned up and demanded to connect your laptop to the client's system, and wouldn't take "no" for an answer? You kept pushing it.

2. You were given a crap PC.

3. You weren't given Internet access for "relevant technical articles" (and yet you were only required to add two fields to an ASP page.)


I don't doubt that it was a crap gig, but FFS, 1 &3. happen in lots of places and 2. happens everywhere. Get over it!

[Gentile]

So let us get this straight.

OK

1. You turned up and demanded to connect your laptop to the client's system, and wouldn't take "no" for an answer? You kept pushing it.

I didn’t “demand” anything. Nor did I “keep pushing” when the answer to my initial request about putting my laptop on their network was no. If you’d read what I actually wrote above, you'd know that I asked if I could connect my laptop to their network (plenty of others would just have ploughed ahead and done it without seeking permission), and when they said no I suggested reasonable alternatives, which were also refused. In spite of those artificial obstacles, which as I mentioned weren’t applied to their internal staff (and even certain other external staff), I got the job done regardless, which seemed to upset them more than anything else.

2. You were given a crap PC.

I didn’t say the PC I was asked to use was crap. I said the PC I was asked to work with belonged to someone else, who was on holiday at the time, and at whose desk I was being asked to sit temporarily. I was therefore required to spend my first day setting up large amounts of software (Visual Studio, Resharper, SQL Server, plus a ton of other stuff they were inadvisedly using and required me to install), on a PC that I would thereafter only be able to use for approximately 10 working days before having to go back to square one and repeat the same process at some other holidaying permie’s desk, losing all my customisations in the process. This time-wasting exercise was rendered even more frustrating by the fact that my login had nowhere near the amount of privileges required for the task, meaning I had to go off and find the manager of the department repeatedly as various prompts came up seeking authorisation for installing the software that they required me to use on their own machine.

3. You weren't given Internet access for "relevant technical articles" (and yet you were only required to add two fields to an ASP page.)


I don't doubt that it was a crap gig, but FFS, 1 &3. happen in lots of places and 2. happens everywhere.

Even for such a small task, I did encounter various snippets that I had to look up the precise syntax for; I’m not too proud to admit that. That’s the nature of the developers’ game – I’m not a robot; I carry concepts around in my head, not massive amounts of irrelevant syntax that I should be able to look up at will. I would think that most professional developers could relate to that, if they are honest.

Save pretending that you are omnipotent and know all of the minutiae there is to know about every technical topic under the sun without ever having to look anything up for interviews with non-technical clients. Good developers know that this game is not about keeping every piece of knowledge that you need to have access to in order to fix every discrete problem in your head. Rather, it’s about having enough knowledge and experience to be able to make use of external knowledge resources to discover what you need to know in a given circumstance efficiently, and having enough skill to be able to put that discrete-to-a-given-problem knowledge to good use across a broad spectrum of solutions.

More relevantly, though, believe it or not, I had actually anticipated that in a three month contract I may be asked to engage in slightly more challenging work than that which was put on my plate during only my first few days. That further work would have been helped considerably by having access to the basic resources that I mentioned. I don’t think any technical professional in this day and age should have to make a case for being able to access the internet at work, and contrary to what you say above this is not a restriction that I’ve encountered on any other client site, let a alone “in lots of places”, and I am a DV-cleared contractor. Your even attempting to defend a client not providing access to the internet for technical contractors in this day and age is beyond ridicule; that resource is a basic necessity for what it is that we do.

Get over it!

As I mentioned, I went on to get a more worthwhile contract within a week of gladly leaving this particular deadbeat client behind, and I now view the incident purely as a learning experience (I learned never to deal with the IB sector again). However, just for the record, even if I hadn’t brushed off this experience as readily as an agent loses their ethics in the face of a fat cheque, the day I take rude directives dressed up as common wisdom from a keyboard warrior with as many holes in their argument as you is the day I’ll chuck it all in and accept one of the permie posts I get offered every few months.