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Citigroup plans to hire 4k tech staff
- coderintherye 4y agoWow, I had no idea they had this many purely tech staff: "Citi currently has more than 30,000 software engineers."
- aruanavekar 4y agowonder how many of 4k are new-hire vs replacement staff
- ramphastidae 4y agoI wonder how many those are part-time contractors or outsourced.
- MattGaiser 4y agoAnd outsourced to the crappiest of contracting firms like FDM or Infosys.
- raincom 4y agoThey even had a tech company within citi. https://www.citigroup.com/citi/news/2009/090120e.htm https://www.citigroup.com/citi/news/2009/090120e.htm
- vxNsr 4y agoThis was actually fairly common in super large international conglomerates. At their size it made sense for financial reasons. I think these days the way the tax code is set up it kinda doesn't anymore. I've seen a lot of these IT departments sold off.
- civilized 4y agoToo bad they couldn't have a couple of them improve that unusable old loan management program that lost them $900M.
- jpgvm 4y agoSomething that SV engineers seem to not understand is just how much software is private software (also how much of it is just plain old boring "enterprise" Java or C#). It's not glamorous or pays as well as SV startups/unicorns but it's out there and accounts for most of the worlds software.
- snowwrestler 4y agoI’ve heard Jamie Dimon brag on more than one occasion that JP Morgan employs “more programmers than Microsoft.”
- WoahNoun 4y agoAs a customer, I've been very happy with Chase's software, apps, and even their ATMs.
- nebula8804 4y agoWhat are you comparing it to?
- vangelis 4y agoAs a customer of Chase and CapitalOne, I hate having to use any of Chase's apps.
- cuteboy19 4y agoAnother quote "it's a tech company with a banking license"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- floatinglotus 4y agoThey are hiring 2 techs to service their 4k TVs in the conference rooms.
- coding123 4y agoThis made me laugh.
- bni 4y agoThey will compete in the 4k demo compo
- fanick 4y agoAngry upvote.
- nebula8804 4y agoYou joke but some of these parties really need the funding. I wouldn't mind a Goldman sachs sponsored 4k compo and whatever prods may result.
- bni 4y agoI agree, that would be something
- jason2323 4y agoBanks are where tech careers go to die. Expect to be caught in a myriad of "initiatives" that are all fluff. Remember, if you're not making the bank money, you're costing them money.
- danielvaughn 4y agoI did a relatively quick stint at Citibank for about a month. It was the lowest point in my entire career, I'll never do it again.
- abledon 4y agodilbert-esque anecdote please?
- oblio 4y agoWant one? I'm not OP, but I hope this is enjoyable. Ok... I was hired as a DevOps expert by a bank. They had this "user friendly" click-click platform nobody was actually using for automation. I mean, they were trying, but there's a reason modern stuff is Configuration as Code. I wanted to use Jenkins and a bunch of Python scripts. The local "tech expert" shot that down, told me that Jenkins was for "builds". I was like, ok, in that case let's use something else to trigger the launch of the scripts. While that was in the pipeline, I started working on the Python scripts. I worked a bit on them, got them working form my workstation. Then during the "review", I was asked which version they were. I said, Python 3. Nope, the servers only have Python 2. Ok, I'll make them backwards compatible. Finished that, then I was told that we can't run unapproved Python scripts (!!!). At that point I figured, you know what, what if I write just some local automation to cut down on my tedium, and maybe I share the scripts with the team later on. I asked what I could use for sure, and they told me: whatever I had pre-installed on the workstation. So I wrote a bunch Powershell scripts that controlled the IO of plink.exe (SSH client bundled with PuTTY) to send shell commands to servers. I basically reinvented a dumb version of Python fabric... And I programmed that using Vim bundled with Git Bash, because that was the only decent "simple" editor that I had access to (actual devs were only using company sanctioned Java IDEs with limited plugins allowed, i.e. Eclipse). My scripts ran well, but when it came around to sharing them with the team, I was basically told that it would be more prudent to keep my head down and let people do what they'd always been doing (i.e. deploying manually...). I left shortly after that.
- intunderflow 4y agoHad an offer from Citigroup a few months ago, hope this is useful for anyone approached, this is from my interview/offer experience and from talking to folks at Citi privately: - They claimed remote was impossible, after I told them it was a red line there was suddenly an exception. They did claim this exception required a lot of approvals but take from that what you will. - The projects they wanted me to work on were genuinely ambitious and impactful, not just something thankless. - They claimed to want to start open sourcing large parts of their tech from 2023 onwards. - It's definitely a different world from the rest of tech, people seemed to care about the things they worked on, but the way things were reasoned about just seemed a bit different. - The people I met there are genuinely nice people (at least in Tech) who I'd be happy to sit down and have a coffee with anytime. - Even the very specifically designated tech places had debt coming in from the rest of the company (primarily in process when they had to touch other teams), they did say they had C-Suite buy-in to go solve that but as I didn't join I can't comment on how strong that buy in really is. - Politics is everywhere, people will fight you not on technical merit but because they want to claim responsibility for something even if its inferior to the product you could build - if you don't have the support to push through this I suspect you'd get stuck here. - Corporate structure is confusing because everyone's titles are massively inflated. - Claimed to have internal open source in the Division I interviewed for (didn't expect that). - Offer for 2 YoE UK was VP £190k/year with no stock
- inferiorhuman 4y agoPolitics is everywhere, people will fight you not on technical merit but because they want to claim responsibility for something even if its inferior to the product you could build - if you don't have the support to push through this I suspect you'd get stuck here. In my meager experience this is not unusual in large(r) organizations. At one point at megacorp there was a big push to get me to buy into some atrocious docker orchestration thing as I was part of a high velocity team. There were two teams working on this internal monstrosity and each manager was quite happy to promise entirely contradictory things to promote their own status within the company. I've never been so fast to turn someone's name into a verb. Another shining moment was when the security/compliance department cobbled together a Hashicorp Vault proof-of-concept and lobbed it over the fence at one of the ops teams. The ops team didn't have the bandwidth to deal with it and the security team refused to maintain it. It was ridiculous enough that veeps and directors got involved. Corporate structure is confusing because everyone's titles are massively inflated. This has been my experience at most tech companies I've been at. Claimed to have internal open source in the Division I interviewed for (didn't expect that). Careful what you ask for. ;)
- greatpostman 4y ago
- extant_lifeform 4y ago
- csomar 4y ago
- greatpostman 4y ago
- mindentropy 4y ago>Their brothers are directors in other orgs, cousins run the contracting agencies they hire. I always suspected this. I know someone who got into VP position (inflated position of course) with his so called "contacts". He is the most useless person I have seen.
- greatpostman 4y agoIt’s hard to get insight into. Hard to see anything at all from the outside, and on the inside you will suspect it. But the depth will be impossible to know unless you are accepted into those circles or know someone that is
- extant_lifeform 4y agoJust curious, are you of italian extraction by any chance? Grew up around NJ?
- questime 4y ago
- mont 4y agoSomewhat unrelated but Citi's software has been ... not very good from my perspective as a customer. The app is crashing/down frequently, as is the website. Which seems pretty smelly to me from the outside.
- rwaksmunski 4y agoWhen it's so bad on the front end, just imagine how awful it is on the back end.
- PascLeRasc 4y agoIt is by far the worst website I've ever had to use regularly. It's painful even when it's working.
- zerop 4y agoI thought we are leading to recession ?
- simonswords82 4y agoWarren Buffett once said that it is wise for investors to be “fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful." Might apply here...
- DeathArrow 4y agoIn what countries/regions are they hiring? If they need such a large workforce, maybe you can negotiate a nicer wage than normal for a bank.
- dodgerdan 4y agoAh traditional banking, where tech teams are disposable, seasonal and underpaid. Good luck to anyone who trusts a traditional bank with their technical career.
- thecleaner 4y agoExactly this. However most people's tech skills are React, some-other-backend framework and whatever newest database is being peddled right now. These people are easy to hire for around a 140k base for a bank. For pure tech companies of course the wages would be much higher. Anyways I personally wouldn't be able to work in a place where software is not their core business.
- I_am_tiberius 4y agoMy experience: If big corporations build up staff quickly, they decrease staff quickly as well.
- pixelpoet 4y agoIncoming class action lawsuit from the existing 1080p staff for impossible beauty standards.
- MrYellowP 4y agoThis year has already seen plenty of layoffs and far more will come. Some companies even rescinded job offerings. The economic situation isn't suited for hiring, especially not so many people. But, even worse, it's a bank.
- ryathal 4y agoBanking is ripe for a tech disruption, there's honestly a lot of things that are higher tech in banks than outsiders realize. There's a very good chance in 5-10 years a tech forward bank becomes the dominant player by a lot. An already large bank could pull this off, but I'd say that's less likely since they have to completely redefine their internal culture. The economy also isn't a monolith, different sectors grow and shrink differently. The interest rates were so low that VC was way more attractive, but as rates tick up more traditional banking products will likely become more attractive. Banks took a beating in 2008, because it was bad bank policy that crashed the market, that isn't the case this time.
- sys_64738 4y agoCitigroup will suck the life from your body.
- yomly 4y agoSlightly late to this thread - I heard a rumour that Citi were using Clojure, anyone able to confirm whether this is true for the SG dev team?