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Yes. I work in IT and I'm rich, aren't you rich like the rest on engineers that read Hacker News? Not like the poor people at finance institutions, they create

by kartan 9y ago

Yes. I work in IT and I'm rich, aren't you rich like the rest on engineers that read Hacker News? Not like the poor people at finance institutions, they create so much value and get so few in return...

empath75 9y ago
They're also enabled by IT.
- simonh 9y ago
  Financial institutions are all now IT companies. It's an essential core competency. Money is information.
  - eternalban 9y ago
    And that is precisely why (imo) the finance world engineered the outsourcing strategy (and invested heavily in off shore body shops) in late 90s. At least that is how it looked to me in those days. (The official story was that low skill IT jobs are sent off shore to help the bottom line. This, the official reason for a service and information economy to tech transfer its crown jewels, never made any sense. Consider that software craft is mostly learned on the job, thus gutting the entry level insures future deficits in higher levels. And further that by near universal account, outsourced software projects are technically subpar and subject to multiple rewrites. All this while entire floors at investment banks' IT departments were 'let go'. You do the math.)
  - gizmodo59 9y ago
    A core competency doesn't mean they are IT companies. Knowing how to use a computer is akin to literacy. That does not mean that being so efficient in Excel will make you Martin Shkreli (https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4df5il/martin_shkreli_doing_magic_with_microsoft_excel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4df5il/martin_shkre...) Finance is much more than knowing how to use or even excel at any software or programming. Computer is an enabler in this case IMHO.
    - simonh 9y ago
      They're IT companies that just don't sell any of their tech. But then Facebook don't sell their tech either. Just as a computer is an enabler at Facebook to manage personal contacts and communications, at Google to manage their indexing and advertising business, at Amazon to manage their ordering and inventory systems. Banks nowadays are just as much IT companies as any of these. A typical bank employs thousands of developers. They even develop their own development and service deployment environments, their own IDEs, even their own custom languages, middleware, development frameworks and libraries and database technologies. Some have even rolled their own internal cloud infrastructure services like mini-Azures or a mini-AWS and systems like Hadoop but using entirely custom tech, not just an instance of an open source solution. There is almost nothing going on in the big tech giants in terms of core technology development that some banks somewhere aren't also doing. You might split hairs or come up with some technical definition to avoid classifying them in this way, but if you do you will be deluding yourself. The Banks have found that in many areas they cannot rely on external technology companies to meet their needs, so they have to meet them using internal resources and roll a lot of their own tech.

by kartan 9y ago

empath75 9y ago

They're also enabled by IT.

simonh 9y ago
Financial institutions are all now IT companies. It's an essential core competency. Money is information.
- eternalban 9y ago
  And that is precisely why (imo) the finance world engineered the outsourcing strategy (and invested heavily in off shore body shops) in late 90s. At least that is how it looked to me in those days. (The official story was that low skill IT jobs are sent off shore to help the bottom line. This, the official reason for a service and information economy to tech transfer its crown jewels, never made any sense. Consider that software craft is mostly learned on the job, thus gutting the entry level insures future deficits in higher levels. And further that by near universal account, outsourced software projects are technically subpar and subject to multiple rewrites. All this while entire floors at investment banks' IT departments were 'let go'. You do the math.)
- gizmodo59 9y ago
  A core competency doesn't mean they are IT companies. Knowing how to use a computer is akin to literacy. That does not mean that being so efficient in Excel will make you Martin Shkreli (https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4df5il/martin_shkreli_doing_magic_with_microsoft_excel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4df5il/martin_shkre...) Finance is much more than knowing how to use or even excel at any software or programming. Computer is an enabler in this case IMHO.
  - simonh 9y ago
    They're IT companies that just don't sell any of their tech. But then Facebook don't sell their tech either. Just as a computer is an enabler at Facebook to manage personal contacts and communications, at Google to manage their indexing and advertising business, at Amazon to manage their ordering and inventory systems. Banks nowadays are just as much IT companies as any of these. A typical bank employs thousands of developers. They even develop their own development and service deployment environments, their own IDEs, even their own custom languages, middleware, development frameworks and libraries and database technologies. Some have even rolled their own internal cloud infrastructure services like mini-Azures or a mini-AWS and systems like Hadoop but using entirely custom tech, not just an instance of an open source solution. There is almost nothing going on in the big tech giants in terms of core technology development that some banks somewhere aren't also doing. You might split hairs or come up with some technical definition to avoid classifying them in this way, but if you do you will be deluding yourself. The Banks have found that in many areas they cannot rely on external technology companies to meet their needs, so they have to meet them using internal resources and roll a lot of their own tech.