I was working at an investment bank (as a developer) when this scandal hit. My entire department was laid off as a result. Not because we were involved or complicit in the scandal, but because the scandal indirectly caused a big financial hit to the bank and we were part of the cost cutting measures.
It was a traumatic and tragic moment for me at the time. But in hindsight it was the event that lead to my eyes being opened to the world of Silicon Valley tech companies. Until then, I had naively thought that working as a developer in the IT departments of Wall Street investment banks and hedge funds* was the pinnacle of a SWE career.
* Not referring to places like Citadel or Jane Street or Two Sigma, etc.
>we were part of the cost cutting measures.
>the event that lead to my eyes being opened to the world of Silicon Valley tech companies
I found that being aware of whether you will be part of the cost center or profit center in a company is very useful when deciding where you should work.
This one really hit me personally. When I was young, my father advised me that in my career I should stay "close to the money". It made a lot of sense, and I tried, but I ended up moving increasingly into financial services technology.
Now, 25+ years later, I am the head of technology (C-Level) for a large financial services firm (Fortune 200). I report to the CEO, I lead thousands, I am handsomely compensated, but I am professionally lonely.
Over the years, I have become very, very good at explaining technology concepts to non-tech peers (I think it was an intrinsic skill that got me here), but honestly, I am exhausted. I don't think I have it in me to explain technical debt, or the importance of investing in our platform, or how to run a build/buy process or why having an engineering culture is so important. I long to work at a company where my work is intrinsically respected. My peers are polite, but treat the work my team does like magic. It felt deferential at first, but now it feels condescending. I think I've done a great job of creating a real technology culture, but in the last year I realized I am never going to turn us into a technology company, no matter how hard I try.
The lesson is - if you want to work at a technology company (revenue is directly generated through licensing or SaaS fees), then don't compromise. You won't be able to change the nature of your employer no matter how high up the ladder you climb.
My litmus test is this: If you couldn't imagine a company installing a former engineer as their CEO, don't consider it a tech company no matter what the leadership claims.
If the executives from the CEO on down fail to understand technology as the source of a serious competitive advantage, then you will be seen merely as a glorified janitor, or maybe plumber. They do absolutely essential work, but nobody respects them.
And one guarantee, if your company (or one you are considering) looks at technology as a cost center, then I can guarantee that they do NOT and WILL NOT see technology as the source of any competitive advantage. You'll be nothing more than a plumber on a team of plumbers who will be ignored, until a pipe breaks, then you'll be blamed for it happening even if they congratulate you for fixing it to your face. Good luck with that.
> my father advised me that in my career I should stay "close to the money"
I got the same advice from my father, but it meant something different. I was told if I went into computer science or any engineering, I'd always be a servant to management and my job would be outsourced to India. I would be easily replaceable. Best to be "close to the money" instead... that was management. Also, to make "real money", I'd have to move up from engineering to management and wouldn't be programming anyway.
So I went to business school. Might as well optimize and skip the engineering step and go straight into managment. And to be even closer to the money: finance degree.
15+ years later, while finance has been fine, I just really like programming. I have a real aptitude for it. Had to teach myself to code, started side hustle online business (finance is still day job). I might get the same salary as a FAANG software engineer (without the skyrocketing stock), but I always wonder what if I did comp sci instead.
Then, on HN I see comments like yours. Many here hate management, or in your case, moved up to the top of IT management and still seem unsatisfied.
Now, I figure grass is greener on there side... Management says they are treated like a cost center and engineering is "closer to the money" as in profit center. Engineers, even in the profit center, gripe at those MBAs who are "closer to the money" as in directing the business plan, budget and timelines.
In my next life, I'll just do what I enjoy and am good at.
Agree with this 100%. I now make it a point to avoid any companies where tech is an unrespected cost center, which unfortunately does rule out the overwhelming majority of companies out there.
That said, even companies where SWEs and tech are the profit center are certainly capable of laying you off, so profit vs cost center isn't really any insurance to avoid that sort of fate. Even at the banks I've worked at the traders (profit center) would face the axe before us lowly peasants in the tech departments.
Rather, it's more an issue of respect...and relative compensation.
I have one primary question that I'm trying to figure out during job interviews. "Will my boss understand what I produce and the difficulty involved in producing it?" if the answer is no, the job is going to suck.
It's not just one level though. You can ask the same about whether your boss's boss will understand, and so on and so forth up the food chain.
The problem with many tech-as-a-cost-center companies is that you will quickly run into a person on that hierarchy who doesn't (often at or near the intersection between tech departments and the profit center business departments).
And if your company wants to "flatten the structure" running into that person is more likely and you will run in to them.
I also have a problem with ex-developers who work their way up the structure with time. Generally they drift away from the tech and what tech takes and end up serving their higher masters. So you end up with someone who thinks they know what it takes but hasn't actually done it for many years. Literally had this again the other day when I gave an estimate for a piece of work one of the devs had done a decent bit of investigation on. Bluntly told that was too much time from someone who had really no much more info than the subject line of the bug report. Of course who had the weight to get their estimate across.....(not me)
I like the rule whoever estimates lowest gets to do it. If you aren't in the running to do it, your estimate doesn't count. It's easy to armchair quarterback if someone else is on the line.
> I found that being aware of whether you will be part of the cost center or profit center in a company is very useful when deciding where you should work.
The problem with most tech companies these days is they dont make profits.
Not sure why you would believe this. It is much harder for regulators to interview employees about their activities when they are no longer centrally located for convenient discussions.
Its the same tactic they use in bury investigators with paperwork but for people.
My department was very far removed from the issues in the scandal. I doubt investigators would have had much interest in us or found anything of use from interviewing any of us.
I believe that it was separated and 100% not involved. Do you think your company is above laying off an entire department to keep investigators off the trail of the real problem department?
Fair chance that they exaggerated the financial impact and just used it as an excuse to push through a lay-off they were planning anyway. 'Never let a good crisis go to waste'.
I had a similar nudge into going starting my own thing - I’d been at Refco (a now defunct brokerage) in ‘05 when everything went pop, because they’d been hiding half a billion of bad debt - I saw which way the wind was blowing and scurried away like a rat from a sinking ship.
> I had naively thought that working as a developer in the IT departments of Wall Street investment banks and hedge funds* was the pinnacle of a SWE career.
What was the reasoning behind this thinking? While finance often does have some pretty advanced tech behind it, you can find more cutting edge and complex work at purely technical companies. Or are you speaking of compensation?
I'm not GP but in the 90s I was taught that bigger = better, and to some degree that was true, if you were into old (ergo, very expensive) tech.
In the days before the internet, technology was niche (as was the knowledge to develop and operate it) and super expensive, so only mega corps had decent tech to work with.
This reputation persisted for sometime into the new millennium until we started to see more of these scruffy younguns starting to make noise in the business, and techno, spheres.
GP here. I started my career in the mid-late 2000s. For me some of the reasons that I remember are:
1. Just plain old not knowing better.
2. Being in NYC, my social circle had a lot of Wall Street finance types. In fact, this is still true - I know more finance people amongst my friends than fellow SWEs.
3. Hacker tech culture wasn't as widespread or widely known back then, especially in NYC. Or maybe it was just me. Going back to #1, I thought things couldn't get any better than dressing up in business casual monkey suits every morning and being ordered to dance like a monkey by a hotshot trader in hopes of picking up after his glorious scraps.
4. I thought the money wasn't half bad, making like $80-90k back then. I thought no one could pay better than the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street.
I don't know what a company like Google was paying their engineers back then, but I think it's a somewhat recent phenomenon where tech SWE compensation grossly and utterly outpaced tech-in-finance SWE compensation. Again, I'm not referring to ultra-elite finance firms like Jane Street or Citadel where I understand SWEs do get paid on par (or better) than FAANG.
I distinctly recall even ignoring a Google recruiter's solicitations back then (2007? 2008?) because I naively thought working at my investment bank was utterly superior to anything Google could offer.
Now I know better, and knowing is half the battle.
I regret scoffing at the very idea that Google had a slide in their office. Also thought it would never work to have free coffee, food, table tennis, etc in the workplace as the staff would just slack off. Today I take these perks very seriously and will see the lack of them as a potential concern for any new employer.
It was a traumatic and tragic moment for me at the time. But in hindsight it was the event that lead to my eyes being opened to the world of Silicon Valley tech companies. Until then, I had naively thought that working as a developer in the IT departments of Wall Street investment banks and hedge funds* was the pinnacle of a SWE career.
* Not referring to places like Citadel or Jane Street or Two Sigma, etc.