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Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

Haha, I see this a lot. Banks who pay mediocre developers $150k a year plus crazy benefits to write entry-level reports because fuck it; the salary for the entire IT department is a rounding error on the bonus pool for the traders so who gives a shit? Good luck getting those guys out of a job like that.

Not saying you're mediocre; but a job like that leads to mediocrity and complacency because the work is often unchallenging. Again, nothing wrong with that since your life priorities shift at some point -- taking care of your family with a stable, high-paying job is often far more important in your late 30s than having a kickass fun job. But developers in their late 30s tend to have jobs that aren't so glamorous to us on HN.

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FWIW I know someone who used to work in IT for a bank whose yearly bonus was bigger than my (decent) wage as a programmer at a startup during the Dotcom 1.0 boom. I guess they had to trickle-down some bonuses to the IT guys so they didn't get jealous when the traders were getting their 6 or 7 figure bonuses at the end of the year.

He worked in networking. I guess it was one of the largest private networks in the world, and they had a big budget and got to use tons of interesting gear (make it fast! make it secure!). I don't think his department was mediocre in any way and was probably a rewarding job (providing you can get over the working for an evil corporate kinda thing).

Yeah, banks are the epitome of just throwing money all over the place. You're right though; core systems work at banks is often super-interesting because the total amount they spend on IT systems in a year is so small compared to the amount of business that they do, they go all-out.

I'm speaking more of the peripheral IT functions - the one-off business apps and reporting solutions that departments within banks will often use because no commercial product exists to serve a specialized need. I can think of one example at a major international bank that was executing over a trillion dollars in currency trades a day. They had a pretty basic tool that basically amounted to a spreadsheet with some custom logic that pulled data from a bunch of systems and aggregated it so the traders could book a bunch of smaller trades together and get better rates. This tool was super-niche and quite simple from a programming standpoint, but it made the company probably a million dollars a day. So they paid a guy a full salary to maintain it. He had been in the job for 15 years and was pretty well settled in. They probably didn't need someone full time dedicated to this, but it's not hard to justify $100-150k in salary for someone to maintain a system that generates $200 million a year in pure profit.

Big investment banks pay well. Big consumer banks, not so much, at least in Canada. I was shocked at how low some of the laughable salary offers I received were.

There are two sides of the development coin for companies like banks, though. On one side is your friend who is asked to do the Serious Business. Without a doubt those are the interesting jobs. On the other side is the stupid report development. I've only seen the stupid report development. I've never heard of folks moving from one to the other, though.

I know part of me whished I has switched into TCP/IP from OSI (I was 3rd line support for the uk for X.400) and gone down the multiple CCIE route at BT

> the work is often unchallenging

It's a different challenge. At a bank, you manage a system based on boring, mature technology, that processes billions worth of transactions every day. Or a server park of 20,000 machines. It's not mobile game development, but on the other hand at least it's not mobile game development.

(I've never worked at a bank, but I've talked with people who do.)

It can also be work with too many grotty doesn't-teach-you-anything-technical challenges. For example, a bank that has acquired multiple companies with incompatible, archaic, poorly maintained systems, and struggles to keep them interoperating while stitching them together under some ill-considered technical policies and bizarre regulatory side constraints. Struggling with medium-scale technical challenges that only exist because larger-scale technical best practices aren't followed isn't as productive as it could be. You do learn things but it's akin to learning how to develop code in a dysfunctional language in the absence of specifications and source code control systems and testing: too many of the things you learn tend to be kinda messed up. And by the Anna Karenina principle they may not generalize well to your next job, even if that job also has more than its share of screwed-up challenges.

All businesses tend to have some proportion of work that is too idiosyncratic and ill-conceived to be satisfying or to be a good long-term career choice, and it's dangerous to overgeneralize from anecdotes. But I don't know any way to sharpen up a claim about the proportion of idiosyncratic ill-conceived work so that we could test the claim with proper statistical sampling. Falling back to anecdotal evidence then because it's all I have, there might really be a tendency for some parts of banking have more than their share of this.

I could tell war stories about bizarre regulatory side constraints (my favorite: on location in a country with very strict banking secrecy laws; having to work in the basement, in case someone might see customer data through the window using a telescope), but if a bank today doesn't have its IT department in order, it won't be able to compete with those who do.

Some banks can be so weirdly huge, that one department may be developing a simple website with last decade's technology, while another has computer scientists working on algorithms for a high frequency trading system with microsecond accuracy, which may never at any point have an unscheduled hiccup of a fraction of a second. As far as challenges are concerned, it's hit or miss, just like in any other sector.

Any tips on getting those entry level reporting job at banks who pay 150,000 USD? I'm 23 so I'm willing to leearn.

The programmers aren't entry level, but the work they're doing is entry level (in difficulty and maybe in quality). I've worked for a bank before and the environment (for this level of work) is stultifying. I just fell into the work, though, and I left after a couple of years. I wouldn't know where to seek it out.

HOWEVER, I can give you a little bit of advice on what skills might be a little bit useful. You want to learn to create reports/data portals for something like Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, SAP's Business Objects, or IBM's Cognos.

Bank of America used to use Oracle's solutions, but as I understand it they're moving over to Business Objects. For the rest, I can't say, but there are a lot of companies that want these skills.

I did look into SAP modules and thought about learning them but how do I market myself after learning the fundamentals? Don't they require some sort of computer degree? How do I gain professional experience which the job opening might require? That thought made me abandon learning SAP.

Oh good god I do Business Objects work right now. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Not even for 150k.

Well shit. I start a new job working on it ... on Monday.

Any suggestions for books on it? They're training me, but the more I can learn on my own, the better.

I'm mostly self-trained. That's probably a part of the problem. The utterly broken way that my team decided to build the reports probably doesn't help either.

Sorry, no suggestions for books.

Do you know if you'll be working with Crystal Reports? Or directly with the Business Objects API? Either way they're both very, very poorly designed and implemented. Good luck I hope you're getting paid well.

How long will it take to become proficient enough in SAP Business Objects which can get you hired? If entirely self taught

Honestly, it wouldn't take you long to get the skills if you could get access and were a decent programmer already. One of the problems with these sorts of systems though is that it's not like they're open source and easily available outside of the enterprise.

Want to set up a testing instance and just play around or build something? They're either not available or horribly crippled. If you can get into a company that is doing it already and you can get access, you will have an easy time learning it (but it's not exactly fun).

I knew a very smart guy who got a job like this. After a couple of years he threw it away and moved to Brazil, after teaching himself Portuguese by hanging out in soccer forums and IRC channels. He teaches English now.

work in wall street or the City supporting traders and their ghastly self written excel POS - and expect to get the "I have a pair of shoes that cost more than your entre wardrobe" gibes

Thankfully, I'm not at a bank. My employer build software and licensing is the primary source of revenue. And I haven't written entry-level reports since, well, never.

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