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JPMorgan Suffered Exodus of Tech Talent Before Breach by Hackers

87 points by zabalmendi 12y ago

_random_ 12y ago
Do financial houses even refer to any of IT staff as "talent"? Usually when they say "talent" they mean traders and senior staff.
- johansch 12y ago
  Given how important high frequency trading has become, I would guess the developers working on that is held in high regard. Sysadmins/"IT people" are probably seen as janitorial.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    I was recently offered a DevOps job at Citidel making well over $150K/year in Chicago. I don't consider that as "janitorial".
    - brave-new 12y ago
      But it is, obviously. IT is the new blue collar. With $150K/year you can have a stay at home spouse, 2 cars a house, kids in more or less good schools. Same as a blue collar job in the 70s.
    - _random_ 12y ago
      That's a good money (providing it's not a 24h job), but what about treatment? Sales people make more than average devs at Google, but who gets more respect?
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        Which is why I took a lower paying DevOps job at a startup. I make less, but the people I work with are incredible, not just in their talent, but as a whole. I'd rather not swim with sharks.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - nerfhammer 12y ago
    I have known "IT people" on wall street who were making 200-300k
otakucode 12y ago
One might be persuaded to believe that IT is actually something that provides a monetarily significant benefit to an organization... but we know that can't be true. Just because every iota of every business flows through computers and even minor software projects can multiply the productivity of employees by an order of magnitude, that doesn't mean management should be expected to value IT in such a way that they actually are willing to pay significant amounts for it!
- lukasm 12y ago
  I worked for a while for Morgan Stanley and have 20 friends that work in finance. They pay a lot for IT. Good hacker can make 300k, but the main problem that big banks have is complexity. Years of M&A, 20 systems that do the same. Simply paying more is not a solution.
  - VonGuard 12y ago
    Yup. You like supporting COBOL? FORTRAN? How about some PL/1 running on AIX or something equally as byzantine... M&A can ruin your will to live.
    - opendais 12y ago
      Bah, at least PL/1 is still maintained by IBM. Come back when the language you are running on that AIX system is completely dead since before 1990 and there is no online documentation for it. ;)
      - VonGuard 12y ago
        ALGOL
        opendais 12y ago
        Fair enough :)
      - deleted 12y ago
twistedpair 12y ago
Having worked at a JPMo competitor for several years, we did certainly value IT. At most such shops IT spend is around $3 Billion a year, so they're not messing around. Many even created specific dev centers around the world (i.e. London, Moscow, India, RTP, Dallas) specifically to do just dev. But, the real kicker is at few such firms will you find the tech "talent." They might join mistakenly, but usually they'll get out within a year or two to better pastures at startups or SV. What often remains are the folks that are mainly task masters at CRUD forms, but not anyone that thinks about the merits of various architectures, reads up on optimal coding practices, or that learns in their free time. Nope, those are the high paid "contractors" that are hired when folks can't figure out why a six foot long query is running slowly.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  > Many even created specific dev centers around the world (i.e. London, Moscow, India, RTP, Dallas) specifically to do just dev. Being in Dallas, I have poked around at openings for some of them. They seem to be the epitome of enterprise HR buzzword bingo.
- rrrx3 12y ago
  Exactly. So many go along to get along types that progress will never be made.
- Hansi 12y ago
  Having worked in the front office at a JPMo competitor for several years, most people around me certainly hate IT. This is because our IT is diligent and wants to do things correctly and follow standards and practice. But there is no effort to educate the money makers to this effect, they just want results yesterday. So they bitch and wine about IT being a blackhole where requests go to die. And I agree with them in many cases as someone who's sort of midway between these people.
- dneronique 12y ago
  > but not anyone that thinks about the merits of various architectures, reads up on optimal coding practices, or that learns in their free time That's a bit demeaning IMO. As with any large corporation, there will be people who stay for years and years just coasting and letting their skills stagnate. However, there are also a lot of people who work hard, learn rapidly, and move around a lot internally instead of changing companies.
brational 12y ago
So tangentially related but what does it take to increase wages in the US? We've been hearing the rhetoric for a while now that over the past 10/20/30 years productivity improvements simply go to the top and real wages decline with the hand-waving recourse that it's just the way capitalism works. But how do you actually prevent this? Unions are obviously one solution but can be wrought with other issues. Besides that, it seems there really is no solution to wage stagnation outside of major failures or security breaches which hit the business' pockets directly. I don't just mean in IT but it does seem to be an area where salary growth doesn't match up _at all_ with the amount of value it adds to a business, especially in the case of IT within a non-IT company.
- lukasm 12y ago
  You don't want to increase wages really. Improve quality of life.
- refurb 12y ago
  Wage stagnation doesn't tell the whole picture. Workers are compensated through other means as well (benefits). Also, purchasing power for many goods has increased.[1] [1]http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304026804579411300931262562 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230402680...
  - MaysonL 12y ago
    Note, of course, that benefits have also stagnated, if not been cut. Defined benefit pension plans disappear, part time workers (with no benefits) replace full time workers, and health insurance increasingly is paid for by the worker, with increasing copayments.
    - refurb 12y ago
      That's not what the data says. Did you read the article?
- innguest 12y ago
  In my view, salaries for programmers should be going down, not up. For instance, I think house construction is overpriced because I think "what's so hard about putting up walls around some ground?". The answer is everything is hard about it. But that it is hard is incidental. By that I mean, it was harder before, and now it is easier, and it should get even easier (there are 3D printers printing houses now) and therefore cheaper. A non-programmer thinks the same way about software as I do about houses: "what's so hard about telling the computer to do grab this data and transform it?". Well, all of it is hard, but again, it's incidental. It would have been more expensive in the past because it was harder, and it will be easier in the future (Docker, NixOS, mathematically proven programs that do not require maintenance, etc). It's nice being a programmer today but we won't ride this forever. As we automate ourselves out of the market, it will be a net benefit to everyone (as no one will have to program as hard or as much as today).
enjoy-your-stay 12y ago
Reminds me a bit of the problems RBS had after large cutbacks and outsourcing had removed a lot of the in house expertise from their batch processing team. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/28/rbs_job_cuts_and_offshoring_software_glitch/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/28/rbs_job_cuts_and_off...
skippy81 12y ago
"The departures meant that executives with intimate knowledge of JPMorgan’s systems..." Working most of my life in financial services, executives dont have intimate knowledge unless the systems in place happen to be the same ones they helped build 10-15 years ago (which is true in some cases). I still consider myself hands on, although not cutting code on a daily basis, and I dont have intimate knowledge of those systems. They will still phone me at 2am despite that.
Confusion 12y ago
If the security of the JPM website depends on 5 executive level employees leaving within a short time, then there certainly is something to worry about.
notastartup 12y ago
Does geography play a large role in being able to get into such large banking organization? It sounds so easy from the comments.
hiharryhere 12y ago
As someone who used to work in tech at JPM, the exodus doesn't really surprise me. Though I don't think a few execs leaving would precipitate this kind of event.
rbc 12y ago
I'm not surprised at all. The article focuses on leadership brain drain, but I think it's more basic then that. Really complicated systems are getting built and deployed every day. After a while, the folks who built the system don't really know how it works anymore, because they are busy building the next thing. After a little longer, the underlying infrastructure (OS and native libraries), platform (java, node, ruby, etc...) and persistence (Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB, you get the idea...) starts to become vulnerable to zero-day exploits and you get one of these big breaches. Maybe I'm just being cynical ;) It's sort of like the old rusty ship that finally sinks. It happens all the time...
GrinningFool 12y ago
" The departures meant that executives with intimate knowledge of JPMorgan’s systems... were gone" Yeah, um, worked there. At least in my line of business and those others I was exposed to, losing the executives may have been beneficial in terms of knowledge because it's possible that the newcomers would try to learn the stuff that the departees never bothered to know in the first place.
- chase_anon32 12y ago
  Having also worked there, I can confirm. How little most managers and executives know and understand about the systems they own can be quite shocking. Their sole focus seems to be playing office politics to get more funding assigned to their projects.
known 12y ago
IT dept in GS is more efficient than JPM.

87 points by zabalmendi 12y ago

Do financial houses even refer to any of IT staff as "talent"? Usually when they say "talent" they mean traders and senior staff.

johansch 12y ago
Given how important high frequency trading has become, I would guess the developers working on that is held in high regard. Sysadmins/"IT people" are probably seen as janitorial.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  I was recently offered a DevOps job at Citidel making well over $150K/year in Chicago. I don't consider that as "janitorial".
  - brave-new 12y ago
    But it is, obviously. IT is the new blue collar. With $150K/year you can have a stay at home spouse, 2 cars a house, kids in more or less good schools. Same as a blue collar job in the 70s.
  - _random_ 12y ago
    That's a good money (providing it's not a 24h job), but what about treatment? Sales people make more than average devs at Google, but who gets more respect?
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Which is why I took a lower paying DevOps job at a startup. I make less, but the people I work with are incredible, not just in their talent, but as a whole. I'd rather not swim with sharks.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- nerfhammer 12y ago
  I have known "IT people" on wall street who were making 200-300k

otakucode 12y ago

One might be persuaded to believe that IT is actually something that provides a monetarily significant benefit to an organization... but we know that can't be true. Just because every iota of every business flows through computers and even minor software projects can multiply the productivity of employees by an order of magnitude, that doesn't mean management should be expected to value IT in such a way that they actually are willing to pay significant amounts for it!

lukasm 12y ago
I worked for a while for Morgan Stanley and have 20 friends that work in finance. They pay a lot for IT. Good hacker can make 300k, but the main problem that big banks have is complexity. Years of M&A, 20 systems that do the same. Simply paying more is not a solution.
- VonGuard 12y ago
  Yup. You like supporting COBOL? FORTRAN? How about some PL/1 running on AIX or something equally as byzantine... M&A can ruin your will to live.
  - opendais 12y ago
    Bah, at least PL/1 is still maintained by IBM. Come back when the language you are running on that AIX system is completely dead since before 1990 and there is no online documentation for it. ;)
    - VonGuard 12y ago
      ALGOL
      - opendais 12y ago
        Fair enough :)
    - deleted 12y ago

twistedpair 12y ago

Having worked at a JPMo competitor for several years, we did certainly value IT. At most such shops IT spend is around $3 Billion a year, so they're not messing around. Many even created specific dev centers around the world (i.e. London, Moscow, India, RTP, Dallas) specifically to do just dev. But, the real kicker is at few such firms will you find the tech "talent." They might join mistakenly, but usually they'll get out within a year or two to better pastures at startups or SV. What often remains are the folks that are mainly task masters at CRUD forms, but not anyone that thinks about the merits of various architectures, reads up on optimal coding practices, or that learns in their free time. Nope, those are the high paid "contractors" that are hired when folks can't figure out why a six foot long query is running slowly.

vonmoltke 12y ago
> Many even created specific dev centers around the world (i.e. London, Moscow, India, RTP, Dallas) specifically to do just dev. Being in Dallas, I have poked around at openings for some of them. They seem to be the epitome of enterprise HR buzzword bingo.
rrrx3 12y ago
Exactly. So many go along to get along types that progress will never be made.
Hansi 12y ago
Having worked in the front office at a JPMo competitor for several years, most people around me certainly hate IT. This is because our IT is diligent and wants to do things correctly and follow standards and practice. But there is no effort to educate the money makers to this effect, they just want results yesterday. So they bitch and wine about IT being a blackhole where requests go to die. And I agree with them in many cases as someone who's sort of midway between these people.
dneronique 12y ago
> but not anyone that thinks about the merits of various architectures, reads up on optimal coding practices, or that learns in their free time That's a bit demeaning IMO. As with any large corporation, there will be people who stay for years and years just coasting and letting their skills stagnate. However, there are also a lot of people who work hard, learn rapidly, and move around a lot internally instead of changing companies.

brational 12y ago

So tangentially related but what does it take to increase wages in the US? We've been hearing the rhetoric for a while now that over the past 10/20/30 years productivity improvements simply go to the top and real wages decline with the hand-waving recourse that it's just the way capitalism works. But how do you actually prevent this? Unions are obviously one solution but can be wrought with other issues. Besides that, it seems there really is no solution to wage stagnation outside of major failures or security breaches which hit the business' pockets directly. I don't just mean in IT but it does seem to be an area where salary growth doesn't match up _at all_ with the amount of value it adds to a business, especially in the case of IT within a non-IT company.

lukasm 12y ago
You don't want to increase wages really. Improve quality of life.
refurb 12y ago
Wage stagnation doesn't tell the whole picture. Workers are compensated through other means as well (benefits). Also, purchasing power for many goods has increased.[1] [1]http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304026804579411300931262562 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230402680...
- MaysonL 12y ago
  Note, of course, that benefits have also stagnated, if not been cut. Defined benefit pension plans disappear, part time workers (with no benefits) replace full time workers, and health insurance increasingly is paid for by the worker, with increasing copayments.
  - refurb 12y ago
    That's not what the data says. Did you read the article?
innguest 12y ago
In my view, salaries for programmers should be going down, not up. For instance, I think house construction is overpriced because I think "what's so hard about putting up walls around some ground?". The answer is everything is hard about it. But that it is hard is incidental. By that I mean, it was harder before, and now it is easier, and it should get even easier (there are 3D printers printing houses now) and therefore cheaper. A non-programmer thinks the same way about software as I do about houses: "what's so hard about telling the computer to do grab this data and transform it?". Well, all of it is hard, but again, it's incidental. It would have been more expensive in the past because it was harder, and it will be easier in the future (Docker, NixOS, mathematically proven programs that do not require maintenance, etc). It's nice being a programmer today but we won't ride this forever. As we automate ourselves out of the market, it will be a net benefit to everyone (as no one will have to program as hard or as much as today).

enjoy-your-stay 12y ago

Reminds me a bit of the problems RBS had after large cutbacks and outsourcing had removed a lot of the in house expertise from their batch processing team. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/28/rbs_job_cuts_and_offshoring_software_glitch/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/28/rbs_job_cuts_and_off...

skippy81 12y ago

"The departures meant that executives with intimate knowledge of JPMorgan’s systems..." Working most of my life in financial services, executives dont have intimate knowledge unless the systems in place happen to be the same ones they helped build 10-15 years ago (which is true in some cases). I still consider myself hands on, although not cutting code on a daily basis, and I dont have intimate knowledge of those systems. They will still phone me at 2am despite that.

Confusion 12y ago

If the security of the JPM website depends on 5 executive level employees leaving within a short time, then there certainly is something to worry about.

notastartup 12y ago

Does geography play a large role in being able to get into such large banking organization? It sounds so easy from the comments.

hiharryhere 12y ago

As someone who used to work in tech at JPM, the exodus doesn't really surprise me. Though I don't think a few execs leaving would precipitate this kind of event.

rbc 12y ago

I'm not surprised at all. The article focuses on leadership brain drain, but I think it's more basic then that. Really complicated systems are getting built and deployed every day. After a while, the folks who built the system don't really know how it works anymore, because they are busy building the next thing. After a little longer, the underlying infrastructure (OS and native libraries), platform (java, node, ruby, etc...) and persistence (Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB, you get the idea...) starts to become vulnerable to zero-day exploits and you get one of these big breaches. Maybe I'm just being cynical ;) It's sort of like the old rusty ship that finally sinks. It happens all the time...

GrinningFool 12y ago

" The departures meant that executives with intimate knowledge of JPMorgan’s systems... were gone" Yeah, um, worked there. At least in my line of business and those others I was exposed to, losing the executives may have been beneficial in terms of knowledge because it's possible that the newcomers would try to learn the stuff that the departees never bothered to know in the first place.

chase_anon32 12y ago
Having also worked there, I can confirm. How little most managers and executives know and understand about the systems they own can be quite shocking. Their sole focus seems to be playing office politics to get more funding assigned to their projects.

known 12y ago

IT dept in GS is more efficient than JPM.