Finance is weirdly disorganized. Everything I hear is you have a long empty period during the day and then a work dump whenever the MD goes home that you scramble to do. You wind up throwing out a lot of work halfway through because someone didn't bother to check whether it was the right thing to be doing or even relevant, just handed you an assignment. Everything's last minute and disorganized, but no one cares because the gaps always get filled with heroic efforts from the interns and junior people.
This sounds like the definition of the next place for software to eat an industry. I guess the number of domain experts is too small, or the knowledge changes too quickly to build into some extremely profitable process management software?
I think there are a bunch of fields, like medicine, medical research (except doing some software simulations of stuff), finance (the process management, not the calculation part), politics and law etc. that are inherently hostile to revolution by software - most competent programmers run away screaming after contact with any such domain and only the dumb ones remain, churning dumb software that doesn't actually solve the problems. And the few good ones that stay become dumbed down and only work at ~40% of their iq and productivity because their minds basically choke on the sheer amount of disorganized domain specific knowledge they have to absorb.
I think if we were to make an analogy of "information as alcohol", a programmer's mind is like an installation that only works well with very "distilled" information (say "vodka" and "whisky" :) ) and may work ok with "wine", but it completely sluggs down if you give it "beer" (completely undistilled information). In some domains (medicine is one that I know of), information is so undistilled, diluted and corrupted that it's basically the analogue of "beer with piss in it and rats swimming in the kegs" ("the rats" are my analogue for the "mud minded" people that "just don't get it and never will" and prevent smart geeks from actually doing their jobs)... that's why I wouldn't touch it with a 100 foot pol and I imagine lots of people feels the same about these areas. I imagine this part of finance is a similar "beer pool".
Bits of the business are being replaced slowly. But a lot of it is essentially sales which is harder to replace. Profit margins are extremely high. Best to build a replacement externally that is not very good then improve it. Don't underestimate the regulation though which is anticompetitive too.
