Yeah, banks are the epitome of just throwing money all over the place. You're right though; core systems work at banks is often super-interesting because the to

Yeah, banks are the epitome of just throwing money all over the place. You're right though; core systems work at banks is often super-interesting because the total amount they spend on IT systems in a year is so small compared to the amount of business that they do, they go all-out. I'm speaking more of the peripheral IT functions - the one-off business apps and reporting solutions that departments within banks will often use because no commercial product exists to serve a specialized need. I can think of one example at a major international bank that was executing over a trillion dollars in currency trades a day. They had a pretty basic tool that basically amounted to a spreadsheet with some custom logic that pulled data from a bunch of systems and aggregated it so the traders could book a bunch of smaller trades together and get better rates. This tool was super-niche and quite simple from a programming standpoint, but it made the company probably a million dollars a day. So they paid a guy a full salary to maintain it. He had been in the job for 15 years and was pretty well settled in. They probably didn't need someone full time dedicated to this, but it's not hard to justify $100-150k in salary for someone to maintain a system that generates $200 million a year in pure profit.