I joined a large bank where I was made the lead on a "mission impossible" project that had been attempted at the place twice before and ending in abject failure. We were tasked with scrapping the 300+ Excel spreadsheets they were using to manage risk and core banking operations and replacing it with a centralized analytics platform. Not only was this a massive technical challenge, but it was a huge political minefield since there was an army of well-connected employees who enjoyed the control and power the spreadsheets gave them over their positions in the bank. Our system would have automated all of that away from them. It took us a little over two years to complete the task at no small cost to us. The application was absolutely brilliant; they could determine their risk exposure to any asset or asset class in the time it takes to fire up a browser when it used to take them hours and many phone calls with the Excel guys. The real-time visibility they had over their entire trading activity was something they had never experienced before. It was so good, that other departments in the bank started dumping their spreadsheets on their own and asking to integrate their core functions into our system. But the number of political battles we fought almost killed the project several times. The PM suffered heaps of abuse to the point where he broke down in tears a few times. It was extremely draining to have a crowd of people waiting for us to make one false move so they could sink a knife into us - so we had to deliver perfection at every iteration so as to be unassailable. The pressure was long-running and intense. All of my colleagues were already congratulating me on what was to be a sure promotion. The head of IT even took me out to dinner and promised me that I had a great future at the bank. Just as we were finishing up the project, they hire a new guy to be our manager, a clueless fuck who washed out of Deloitte after one year. All this guy knew about IT was what he read in vendor brochures. So he comes in, guns a blazing, and declaring that we need to move everything to Hadoop. I tried to respectfully disagree with him, but he would have none of it. But he did like the system we built. So before he arrived, we were supposed to present our solution to the board. When this guy found out, he asked that we present it together. He would make the PowerPoint slides and I would provide the content and context. He was very friendly and also promised that he had areas where he wanted me to be promoted. Then once the slides were done, I heard nothing more from him. So reach out to him to see what's going on and we have a one-on-one meeting. At that meeting, he lays into me about not supporting me with his Hadoop bullshit and says that he sees no future for me at the bank. A week later, he gives the presentation to the board without me and claiming that he was the architect behind the solution we provided. He made no mention of me or my team. he instead brought some yes-men with him, including the PM we were working with, implying that they were the ones that implemented the solution. None of them, of course, had a clue how it worked. I was then told that I would be laid off in a year, but they asked me to help support the application until they could find my replacements. I quit immediately. The PM I was working with sucked up to the new boss and got promoted. After a year the asshole boss got promoted to head of IT after the former one retired. From that day forward, I decided never to work for corporate IT in any capacity. I'm not saying that this can't happen at the likes of MSFT or Amazon given that they're so large now - but I've noticed that with late-stage tech startups, their minds are too focused to not know who is providing value and to favor cronyism over capacity to deliver. #tech #toxic #abuse #workplace
Yes. If you have talent you belong in the software industry, not the IT industry.
Yeah, the money here was good. But yes, I realize that now.
Spent 1.5 years in IT outta college. Never again
What do you do for a living?
Application developer/ Data Engineer
So how much that head of IT makes? How many reports does he have?
Probably about 300K + bonuses. There were about 60 people in our department
Where are you now? TC? The kind of work you describing is what Amazon is after. You can try your luck as L6.
It terrifies me how many of the world's big financial services firms depend on excel as their primary data source for regular end users. Don't get me wrong... They have databases... But they don't share details to access data with the people that need it. The rest of the business goes through that one person per team that has access and the resulting editable and changeable excels get used as the "single source of truth". Honestly terrifying how they operate!
Amazon used to manage most of their networks in a single Excel file.
Amazon was founded by a finance guy :)
Fine don’t work Op Is this the therapy u r looking for ?
Maybe - but mostly a warning for you peeps
Have you thought about vengeance?
Yup, I moved for a tech company to an airline. Good money but it was exactly as you described. As someone put it correctly, we belong in software, not IT
Been there. Done that. Feel sorry for you
Talk to some media house and pay some dollars 💵 to publish your story hiding some details unless you have some agreement with bank also talk to HR i had the same experience while back but after quite a lot of fighting i had to move to separate project if you are smart and data to prove your worked on the project you should be fine
and never be employable again.
Should definitely have escalated to HR or superiors. I doubt media is interested in dirty laundry from a random bank.
Sorry that it happened. You sound inexperienced and likely learned a bigger lesson now than what you'd have by getting promoted. Move on to a place that values you.
I have ovet 30 YOE, but yes
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As soon as I read "bank" I knew where this was headed...nepotism... incompetence...idiots...imagine if all of banking could be automated and get the fuckboys out of the equation. Sorry you had to endure that though, I have a threshold that if I'm pushed past it I just call everyone out for how little they do in front of everyone else...keeps people in check to not fuck around with me. You should have done that and questioned him how it worked in front of everyone else.
Yes. Looking back, I should have done a few things differently. The manager was a moron, so I should have pretended to agree with his Hadoop horseshit and give him all the credit for the failure that would bring with it. Meanwhile, he probably would have left my project alone. I also should have made it a point to publicize internally what we were doing to more people until it wouldn't have been feasible to pretend that he did it. But was I REALLY should have done is agree to stay and support the project and then do nothing. It would have taken them six months to fire me at that place.
Wait, this seems like my company....OP which country are you at.