Early in my career in the 90's I worked for BZW working on derivative hedging for financial swaps. Things were pretty hectic and it was a pretty small team. We

Early in my career in the 90's I worked for BZW working on derivative hedging for financial swaps. Things were pretty hectic and it was a pretty small team. We were using SQL Server at best and Excel spreadsheets as information feeds at worst, trying to calculate Black-Scholes on this stuff. I clearly remember talking to the Traders and Quants regarding certain calculations we were doing to give them bond price goals for offsetting risk on the trades. Honestly the traders at least didn't give a crap. I would present them tables; they would look at it, and would say "yeah that looks about right" - that's a direct quote from BZW's lead trader in 1994. I can't imagine things have changed that much. I didn't stay long in that environment; it was pretty clear to me that despite getting people like Grady Booch coming in to clean up our act our "Customers" didn't really care too much about the mechanics of how things worked, or even worse whether the calculations were correct. Top and bottom is, while the banking industry may employ "Cowboys" in the back-office for IT services, they also employ Cowboys in the front-office making the trades. I doubt that has changed for the better that much. See 2008 financial crisis et al. [Edit] As a side note, for the time I was earning more money than I knew what to do with. My boss at the time felt so ambivalent about his twice yearly 50k (sterling) bonus that he threw it away at the Casino the day he got it, (remember, this is 1994). I left and took a 75% pay cut to go work for Microsoft on projects that were at least form a CS point of view a lot more respectable. Having said that, I don't want to come off too harshly, we were at the cutting edge at the time and the technology was very cool and thoroughly enjoyable. But still..