Advice for 1st job at bank
I'm a newb to working and a newb to tech in finance. I thought I would ask experienced folks whether you have any good advice to someone who is completely fresh. Hopefully, people can be genuine :) Not looking for trolls.
Try to to work as close to business as possible. By business I mean functions that generate revenue. Being in complaince Tech or HR tech is not business. You will learn better tech here, not sure abt quality of work. People can be super passive aggressive here. Try not to fight over technical changes and all, tech is a cost center
Totally this, applies to Capital One as well which makes me think it's industry wide. The closer you are to core products and the more obvious your impact on them the better.
Heist
Build a reputation as someone who partners well across teams and delivers
Try to work in a front office position writing algos or work on low latency trading or data distribution. Any thing else you work on is going to be worthless; including (but not limited to) “FIX engineering”, calculation engines, compliance or surveillance. Avoid working on any system that involves a human pressing a button to trade.
Can you elaborate on the last point?
High touch trading systems are those where a sell side trader sits at a desk and makes decisions about how to execute an order. Low touch systems are those where a machine makes decisions about to how to execute orders according to parameters provided by a trader. Either buy side or sell side trader. High touch trading is dying and it’s career suicide to work on high touch sell side systems for trading equities or derivatives.
Learn the culture and do it their way not industry standards. Wells Fargo cares more about reports and security scans than code quality or technical debt.
All of these comments are true. You'll only learn allot of use cases and people who doesn't know what their requirements is.
Stay on top of your TPS reports
Is this retail or capital markets? Which location?
Can you be a little more specific about what you do (and what you want to do after 5-10 years) ?
focus on relationships, not technologies