Hacker News Reader

Comment by fy20 | Hacker News Reader

In my city there's a few service centres for banks, and the interview process for engineers seems to be "can you spell Python?". I'm sure there are good people there, but there's so many bad people, that having the name of a bank on your CV is often seen as a negative.

On the other hand I know someone who is a DBA. A few years ago she decided to switch to a bank, and the work-life balance is much better than any other company she has worked for. This year they let her work remotely from another EU country for 3 months.

View on HN

If the skill level there is so low it's an opportunity to exceed their very low standard and still finish the workday in a couple hours and then enjoy the rest of the time or use it to work elsewhere/build a side-project/etc. Seems like an amazing deal to me.

You can do that, yes, but it’s surprisingly tricky and stressful to manage.

Bear in mind that most of the people there won’t actually realise that they’re low skill level. In fact, they probably think they’re high skill level because they’re working in a bank and banks are elite, right? That is a toxic combination.

So actually you spend much of your time fending off requests to change your work in stupid ways or making futile attempts to avoid the codebase turning into spaghetti code.

It’s not the case that you can just turn in two hours’ code and everyone’s happy with your day’s achievement.

It is exhausting to have to argue the case for every minimal piece of good software design (eg validating inputs, designing minimal interfaces, avoiding god classes).

Eventually you give up and/or they think you’re stupid because you find their spaghetti code hard to understand. The app becomes increasingly slow, hard to maintain and full of weird bugs. Everyone wonders how this could have happened and the rewrite begins.

> In fact, they probably think they’re high skill level because they’re working in a bank and banks are elite, right?

Over last two years I had to work with few people who worked in banking as C# developers, they all had 8-12 years of experience and they wrote worst, most outdated, unreadable and untestable spaghetti code I've ever seen. First week on the job I've added StyleCop to all our projects because I just couldn't stand people being unable to press one shortcut to format their own code(or install an extension to do that for them). This way it wasn't me pointing out ugly code, it was the pipeline, 'pls fix'.

Obviously there are people and people, but so far I've only noticed that developers who worked in banking institutions usually have a lot of experience in that one or two particular companies and they barely can do anything of value on their own.

100% true.

I did a small stint at a mid tier bank and this is exactly how it went. You try to advocate for better methods and you constantly hit inertia and a deep institutional belief in years of service.

"You use git? Interesting but our director (15 YOE) says it's a waste of time. Do you claim you know more than him? You've only just started here!"

In the end you could easily do the assigned work in 10h a week except you are hobbled by bad practices, poor infrastructure, cheap leadership (you want an IDE? our division didn't approve the expense) and so so much Legacy code.

It's also hard to see all these problems when you are in the middle of them. Finance culture is toxic in ways you don't notice until you leave.

"It is exhausting to have to argue the case for every minimal piece of good software design"

So don't do that. It's rarely worth it. I'm happy to bill $150 an hour while a couple of colleagues argue vehemently about directory structures on S3.

If you care that much about every minimal aspect of software design, then you need your own personal project. Landing on a team that all have the same good sense about software development with the ability to express that is just pure luck.

You're right, that's the way to look at it. If you can be transactional, it's ok and maybe you can get away with a 10hr week.

But it's still tiring to see code being merged and thinking "that's going to make X, Y and Z harder for me to do". Or being asked/told to make bad changes. Or being the one who has to do the emergency fix for the non-null assertions causing runtime exceptions in prod (which you had flagged in review and been told "the compiler is wrong, we know they can't be null").

Reply on news.ycombinator.com