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Working at a bank, I know there are at least a few traders who would love to exterminate most/all in-house developed systems, fire most of the tech employees sa

Working at a bank, I know there are at least a few traders who would love to exterminate most/all in-house developed systems, fire most of the tech employees save for a minimal skeleton support crew, and go back to using good ol' trusty Excel.

zhte415 6y ago
Traders however tend to have: A - A pretty numerical mindset. Sit in front of their computers all day. Know their processes inside-out. B - Perhaps not formally trained, but working with data, Bloomberg extracts, a self-taught sense in normalising data. C - If there's an Excel function that saves time, they know it. This also leads to trader-as-a-developer with personal VBA scripts as that's good enough and there's an IDE in Excel that doesn't need layers of approval to use (which is obviously a disaster) - this also means thinking "If I can do this in Excel in a day, why does it need a development team of 5 to do in a month?" D - Fast turn-around. That means keeping on top of messages, dates, calendar. And a sense of prioritising this without needing a system to do it. And messages pumped through mail, phone, BBM, conversations all tied together. E - Don't want to be Nick Leeson and have a grudging acceptance that compliance and audit is a thing. F - Except when they don't. Contrast that to typical clerical roles where these things are somewhat 'slower paced' and doing things with Excel/following-up emails becomes a disaster - not in all cases, but in many. All BAs I know in banking/finance are exceptional communicators that get through points A-F above.
- osullivj 6y ago
  In my experience D: Fast turn-around also applies to software dev. Traders get frustrated waiting for IT to deliver new features and systems, so hack up a solution in the closest available tool - Excel.
osullivj 6y ago
And the converse. IT depts at banks want to exterminate Excel solutions as they're perceived as unsupportable. But on trading floors traders are the boss, so Excel will never be decommed.
- decafninja 6y ago
  Yup, this too. Although another factor that supports decommissioning Excel based hacky solutions is regulatory stuff.

zhte415 6y ago

Traders however tend to have: A - A pretty numerical mindset. Sit in front of their computers all day. Know their processes inside-out. B - Perhaps not formally trained, but working with data, Bloomberg extracts, a self-taught sense in normalising data. C - If there's an Excel function that saves time, they know it. This also leads to trader-as-a-developer with personal VBA scripts as that's good enough and there's an IDE in Excel that doesn't need layers of approval to use (which is obviously a disaster) - this also means thinking "If I can do this in Excel in a day, why does it need a development team of 5 to do in a month?" D - Fast turn-around. That means keeping on top of messages, dates, calendar. And a sense of prioritising this without needing a system to do it. And messages pumped through mail, phone, BBM, conversations all tied together. E - Don't want to be Nick Leeson and have a grudging acceptance that compliance and audit is a thing. F - Except when they don't. Contrast that to typical clerical roles where these things are somewhat 'slower paced' and doing things with Excel/following-up emails becomes a disaster - not in all cases, but in many. All BAs I know in banking/finance are exceptional communicators that get through points A-F above.

osullivj 6y ago
In my experience D: Fast turn-around also applies to software dev. Traders get frustrated waiting for IT to deliver new features and systems, so hack up a solution in the closest available tool - Excel.

osullivj 6y ago

And the converse. IT depts at banks want to exterminate Excel solutions as they're perceived as unsupportable. But on trading floors traders are the boss, so Excel will never be decommed.

decafninja 6y ago
Yup, this too. Although another factor that supports decommissioning Excel based hacky solutions is regulatory stuff.