My primary goal in writing this is to connect with the audience of hiring managers who receive applications from candidates at banks
My goal is to convince you that 1 bit of info - that a resume is from a candidate at a bank - is not enough information to make viable assessments about the quality of the candidate. There is more info hidden behind that bit if you dig.
This additional info is based on the position that large FIs are so big that you cannot characterize developers working in them in any generic way.
The rest of the post is mostly a pyramid-style case-build in a wall-of-text making this case.
Net point I want to make is that there is no one global characterization of developer capabilities for folks in a large FI / bank that holds true to any extent. You have to know more by understanding where in the bank they worked, the technical environment they were in and what type of work they did.
Long Version
I want to offer evidence: from fact but somewhat anecdotal because the one 1 bank I know lots about != all banks ...
Warning - this is a long post and is a bit all over the place because I wrote it fast to get it out before the post gets too old. I also tried to be as generic as possible in my arguments so that they align with most FIs as much as possible. Please bear with my generalizations for those reasons
I am 'developer' who has worked in FANG, government, startups, healthcare, big-4 type consulting and other roles: currently at a 50k+ person bank in a hands-on tech/dev leadership role
First some context:
Banks, especially the big ones, are actually so big that they cannot be characterized as one company from both management and tech perspective.
It is better to think of them as a conglomerate of independent companies.
The org structure actually reflects this: you will find leaders who are responsible for everything, including P&L, for an entire group of say 1k-5k people (out of a total 100k employees) 1, 2 or even 3 levels down the overall org chain. These leaders will will have a title that, literally, says CEO of $X Business at $Y Bank. They are actually running fully independent business under the larger FI umbrella.
Most relevant for this thread - this operating structure means tech decisions are made independently, for each internally group, at the P&L business unit level, not at top of house.
Saying this a different way - there are no bank-wide decisions for production tech choices. There are only P&L group-level tech decisions. Full responsibility for P&L means full responsibility for choosing where and what to spend tech money, among all other monies, on.
The only top of house decisions would be around integration, data exposure and reporting tools. Never ever ever banking process production and production-support systems.
**
A by product of this is that moving orgs within the bank is literally like moving companies. You go to a new office, have new colleagues, with a different culture, working with different tools, on an entirely different tech stack
You might also likely, as a tech person, never interact with group you were in before. Different HR, legal and tech support folks, different leaders, different colleagues, literally like starting at a new company
With the the context above, the net of things is that, depending on where you are in the org, you could be in:
- a part of the financial institution that behaves like a startup, with startup incentives, management and results
(examples could be digital only banking, innovation groups etc etc)
- a part of the financial institution that behaves like how banks are traditionally characterized
(examples could be core banking platforms and systems dev., relationship banking groups eg private or commercial banking )
- a part of the FI that is stuck doing development work based on tech decisions being made elsewhere
(examples could be integration teams, reporting team etc etc)
- a part of the FI that is mission critical and everyone is loath to change - think platforms that NO ONE wants to touch because they JUST WORK and have been working forever and would cost the earth to touch!!
( examples could be mission critical production user facing or batch green screen COBOL/FORTRAN environments on mainframe - this is where the real big $s are, with FANG-type pay for folks with platform and environment specific experience )
I have also found that there are no internal prod tools that run across the org. All tools that are org-global are, by definition, reporting, aggregation or integration tools - taking info from some combo of tools and displaying it / sending it on to another set of tools.
This is the reason why $bn products and companies selling message buses platforms and green screen scrapers exist (TIBCO et. al) and make billions of dollars a year - these companies provide tools and products to connect independent systems (and thus businesses ) in the environment I described above, at scale.
I have worked on maybe 3 of the 4 environments I have described above at the bank where I am now and have found that the spectrum of skills, experience and tools across these orgs runs the entire spectrum of software dev. experience/ skills and needs/capability. The key driver, as with any other business is return on investment
Examples of the spectrum include:
- true, in production, internally built ML platforms for scoring stuff in real time (think card transactions flagging) that are probably close to best in class, that save hundreds of millions in losses annually run by true data scientist Phds
- access DBs to manage some proceed or fill some need with zero return ( eg compliance doc tracking) run by a gal/guy with zero programming/dev training
- completely home-grown self serve platforms with security & data segmentation built in serving groups with 3k+ individual users (which is a lot for a in-house corp tool ) run by the type of small scrappy team you would find at a typical startup
TL;DR:
My primary goal in writing this is to connect with the audience of hiring managers who receive applications from candidates at banks
My goal is to convince you that 1 bit of info - that a resume is from a candidate at a bank - is not enough information to make viable assessments about the quality of the candidate. There is more info hidden behind that bit if you dig.
This additional info is based on the position that large FIs are so big that you cannot characterize developers working in them in any generic way.
The rest of the post is mostly a pyramid-style case-build in a wall-of-text making this case.
Net point I want to make is that there is no one global characterization of developer capabilities for folks in a large FI / bank that holds true to any extent. You have to know more by understanding where in the bank they worked, the technical environment they were in and what type of work they did.
Long Version
I want to offer evidence: from fact but somewhat anecdotal because the one 1 bank I know lots about != all banks ...
Warning - this is a long post and is a bit all over the place because I wrote it fast to get it out before the post gets too old. I also tried to be as generic as possible in my arguments so that they align with most FIs as much as possible. Please bear with my generalizations for those reasons
I am 'developer' who has worked in FANG, government, startups, healthcare, big-4 type consulting and other roles: currently at a 50k+ person bank in a hands-on tech/dev leadership role
First some context:
Banks, especially the big ones, are actually so big that they cannot be characterized as one company from both management and tech perspective.
It is better to think of them as a conglomerate of independent companies.
The org structure actually reflects this: you will find leaders who are responsible for everything, including P&L, for an entire group of say 1k-5k people (out of a total 100k employees) 1, 2 or even 3 levels down the overall org chain. These leaders will will have a title that, literally, says CEO of $X Business at $Y Bank. They are actually running fully independent business under the larger FI umbrella.
Look at HSBC here for example and note how many leaders there are with CEO titles https://www.hsbc.com/who-we-are/leadership-and-governance/se...
**
Most relevant for this thread - this operating structure means tech decisions are made independently, for each internally group, at the P&L business unit level, not at top of house.
Saying this a different way - there are no bank-wide decisions for production tech choices. There are only P&L group-level tech decisions. Full responsibility for P&L means full responsibility for choosing where and what to spend tech money, among all other monies, on.
The only top of house decisions would be around integration, data exposure and reporting tools. Never ever ever banking process production and production-support systems.
**
A by product of this is that moving orgs within the bank is literally like moving companies. You go to a new office, have new colleagues, with a different culture, working with different tools, on an entirely different tech stack
You might also likely, as a tech person, never interact with group you were in before. Different HR, legal and tech support folks, different leaders, different colleagues, literally like starting at a new company
With the the context above, the net of things is that, depending on where you are in the org, you could be in:
- a part of the financial institution that behaves like a startup, with startup incentives, management and results
(examples could be digital only banking, innovation groups etc etc)
- a part of the financial institution that behaves like how banks are traditionally characterized
(examples could be core banking platforms and systems dev., relationship banking groups eg private or commercial banking )
- a part of the FI that is stuck doing development work based on tech decisions being made elsewhere
(examples could be integration teams, reporting team etc etc)
- a part of the FI that is mission critical and everyone is loath to change - think platforms that NO ONE wants to touch because they JUST WORK and have been working forever and would cost the earth to touch!!
( examples could be mission critical production user facing or batch green screen COBOL/FORTRAN environments on mainframe - this is where the real big $s are, with FANG-type pay for folks with platform and environment specific experience )
I have also found that there are no internal prod tools that run across the org. All tools that are org-global are, by definition, reporting, aggregation or integration tools - taking info from some combo of tools and displaying it / sending it on to another set of tools.
This is the reason why $bn products and companies selling message buses platforms and green screen scrapers exist (TIBCO et. al) and make billions of dollars a year - these companies provide tools and products to connect independent systems (and thus businesses ) in the environment I described above, at scale.
I have worked on maybe 3 of the 4 environments I have described above at the bank where I am now and have found that the spectrum of skills, experience and tools across these orgs runs the entire spectrum of software dev. experience/ skills and needs/capability. The key driver, as with any other business is return on investment
Examples of the spectrum include:
- true, in production, internally built ML platforms for scoring stuff in real time (think card transactions flagging) that are probably close to best in class, that save hundreds of millions in losses annually run by true data scientist Phds
- access DBs to manage some proceed or fill some need with zero return ( eg compliance doc tracking) run by a gal/guy with zero programming/dev training
- completely home-grown self serve platforms with security & data segmentation built in serving groups with 3k+ individual users (which is a lot for a in-house corp tool ) run by the type of small scrappy team you would find at a typical startup