Breaking into Banking.. Any tips?

[Gentile]

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

It wasn't JPM, but I'll avoid naming and shaming since it's a bit unprofessional to slag off clients by name on the internet, even ones that deserve it as much as the investment bank I described above. I know what you mean about JPM, though. Morgan Stanley are the same: only apply to them if you want to wait six weeks for them to get off their backside and bother inviting you to interview, then witness them getting all snotty when you tell them you're no longer available and have accepted another gig in the interim.

[Paddy]

It wasn't JPM, but I'll avoid naming and shaming since it's a bit unprofessional to slag off clients by name on the internet, even ones that deserve it as much as the investment bank I described above. I know what you mean about JPM, though. Morgan Stanley are the same: only apply to them if you want to wait six weeks for them to get off their backside and bother inviting you to interview, then witness them getting all snotty when you tell them you're no longer available and have accepted another gig in the interim.

You should not jump to conclusions and mention names
I was referring to Johannesburg & Pretoria Mutual Bank

[Gentile]

You should not jump to conclusions and mention names
I was referring to Johannesburg & Pretoria Mutual Bank

I didn't mention any names - I was alluding to Johannesburg & Pretoria Mutual* when I repeated your usage of the acronym "JPM" too.



* Or JP Morgan, one of the two.

[Moscow Mule]

OK



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.



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.



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.



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.

You're very defensive. Perhaps this attitude doesn't help.

[realityhack]

Late/no logins, temp machines, no install rights and restricted interweb rights are par for the course in banking - along with legacy-spaghetti systems including Access/Excel/Hiked together VB, irritating permies (and contractors) who expect everything handed to them on a plate and prima-donna traders/business-side who will only give you the time of day if you can pretend to speak their language.

However - if you have thick skin, a GSOH and don't sweat the small stuff, it's a piece of cake. I did a stint in the public sector and the two don't compare. At least it's actually possible to get things done in banking.

[KentPhilip]

Working on IT projects in the IB industry sector is worse than working on them in the Public Sector, and that’s saying something.

Aren't they one and the same thing now with all the bailouts?


But I've got a question to those working in in this sector: Does any of this inefficiency in Investment Banking IT management/systems lead to inefficiencies in the trading (automatic or manual) that these banks do?
The reason I ask is that I do a little trading on the financial markets myself, using an automated trading system that I am writing, and I want to know especially the types of stupid things "the other guys" do that I can capitalise on. Potentially.
I don't need to know the specifics, just the general areas.

For example a bank might have code that monitors groups of shares, buying others when one rises sharply. But due to bad code there is a 10-second delay before the others are bought (giving me an edge if I am quick enough). That sort of thing.

Or is all the low hanging fruit in this department all taken now?

[Gentile]

You're very defensive. Perhaps this attitude doesn't help.

Why?, because I presented some valid counter-arguments to invalid criticism that someone else had made of what I said what I'd said? I could equally say that jumping in and offering opinion on a discussion between two people that you weren't involved in without backing that opinion up with specific facts makes you 'argumentative', but I wont, because I'm not arrogant or deluded enough to presume to be able to comment accurately on other people's personality traits based solely on reading a limited number of posts they've made on one specific topic on the internet.

My "attitude" hasn't stopped me being a successful contractor who gets along well with the vast majority of her clients and is able to make a good living producing valuable solutions for them. So, if it's all the same to you, in spite of your well-researched and eloquently-argued assessment of my core personality, I'll just keep doing my thing. The secret of successful contracting, IMHO, isn't about bending yourself over backwards to fit the odd unreasonable client's irrational demands; it's about planting yourself in fertile ground and being able to grow there. I'll leave trying to appease unreasonable employers to permies.

[Gentile]

Aren't they one and the same thing now with all the bailouts?

You've got that right - the number of actual employees I saw working in banking whom I'd previously encountered in the Public Sector was telling. Those sectors both even use the same questionable management methodologies, Prince II and ITIL being the prime culprits.

[Freamon]

Aren't they one and the same thing now with all the bailouts?


But I've got a question to those working in in this sector: Does any of this inefficiency in Investment Banking IT management/systems lead to inefficiencies in the trading (automatic or manual) that these banks do?
The reason I ask is that I do a little trading on the financial markets myself, using an automated trading system that I am writing, and I want to know especially the types of stupid things "the other guys" do that I can capitalise on. Potentially.
I don't need to know the specifics, just the general areas.

For example a bank might have code that monitors groups of shares, buying others when one rises sharply. But due to bad code there is a 10-second delay before the others are bought (giving me an edge if I am quick enough). That sort of thing.

Of course, but you're probably thinking along the wrong lines. The areas retail investors have access to (traditional things like equities) are all very mature and have HFT arbitrage houses crawling all over them.

The issues that brought the banks down a few years ago are, in some cases, at least distantly related to software bugs, e.g.:

FT Alphaville » FT Alphaville exclusive: Moody

BTW you may be interested in exploring the following forum:

Nuclear Phynance

[d000hg]

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.

I worked for a consultancy (as my last permie gig as it happens) who worked with several departments of Lehman, mainly IB. I'd say the code itself was fairly OK. A bit old-fashioned - not using fancy Spring/Hibernate in favour of more traditional JSP/servlet/DAO approaches (which I personally see no problem with) - but fairly clean and using proper test/stage/production, unit testing, etc.

I've been tempted a couple of times to get a gig in London and commute weekends, but never been benched properly to pursue it. It's one industry I also imagine you would really struggle to get any work-from-home opportunities, which is an issue too.