It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies • Hacker News Board

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#81

Post by s73v3r_ » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 6:14 PM UTC

DrBazza wrote: post #24

Really? Sounds like the author has never worked in either, and just reads news sites. Having worked in several of both 'MegaBank LLC' and 'A Small Tech Company', they're utterly different beasts. Just because both mention blockchain doesn't mean they're the same. Culturally, they're worlds apart. Banks offer a career path up and away from technology so you get unmotivated developers joining who are just looking for t…

I wouldn't say those things are what makes a tech company a tech company.

"Banks are only driven to make money"

If you don't think tech companies are the same way, you're sorely mistaken.

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#82

Post by shkkmo » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 6:14 PM UTC

lugg wrote: post #63

freehunter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the difference is that Facebook is an aggregator and doesn't actually publish or write any of their own content. They're a media company, sure, but they're not directly comparable to newspapers or cable news outlets.

Exactly what do newspapers and cable news have in common with each other that Facebook doesn't?

They pay reporters.

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#83

Post by raesene9 » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

curun1r wrote: post #71

raesene9 wrote: post #12

I'm of the opinion that all banks should be technology companies, in that pretty much all of their operations rely on computing, so the better they are at developing and operating computer systems they better they'll be able to do business. Unfortunately, many banks (at least in the UK market) seem to see IT as some kind of overhead, to be minimized in cost and/or outsourced (e.g. Lloyds outsourcing to IBM https://ww…

On the other hand, it would be great for consumers and those wanting to offer software in the banking ecosystem if there were more standardization in the banking industry. I'd be surprised if anything a bank does is so unique that it requires all their software to be bespoke. Perhaps we could get better security and usability if there were some large providers that offered key software to almost everyone in the indus…

In the UK at least, we have a ray of hope on that front as mandatory Open banking APIs are on the way (https://www.openbanking.org.uk/) which should make it a lot easier for software providers to write applications on top of existing accounts and providers.

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#84

Post by jnordwick » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

123212321 wrote: post #40

nissimk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Many smaller financial firms derive their advantage from technology. There are many areas of finance aside from high frequency trading and they all benefit from significant force multiplication from technology. Even in the lowly area of operations automation there are firms that achieve significant scale with a small number of personnel through technological advantage. Granted this is sometimes achieved with a co…

Source is I work in this field. There are positions with big data and data management that pay well. But the ones paying 350k+ are way harder to get than working at a top tech firm. Theres a quant trading firm called engineers gate that has a bunch of ivy league programmers, the top of the top. They havent made a nickel off their technology. They have a had a huge outflow of talent to Google and FB. People do get pai…

If your cutoff is $350k, I'd definitely say your NYC 5k headcout is way too low. By at least an order of magnitude. Even the smallest trading firm will have 5 tech people (devs/data scientist/quants) making that much after bonus.

Edit: maybe $350k is at the border for that 5 each estimate. But i still think you're of by an order of magnitude in nyc in general.

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#85

Post by Talyen42 » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

what is a tech company, really?

it's like saying something is a "concrete company" because that's what the corporate buildings are made of, or a "people company" because they only employ humans

(terms that actually make sense: SaaS product (Salesforce, Dropbox), advertising marketplace (Google, Facebook)... and so on. Not "tech")

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#86

Post by djtriptych » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

I was just at a dev mixer and ran into an engineer at Bank of America. He told me they have 5000 Python developers on staff. I almost fell out of my chair - never would have guessed it. I know there's competition for top talent in NYC, but that's still a surprising number.

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#87

Post by freefood89 » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

sad

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#88

Post by jrs95 » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #72

raverbashing wrote: post #54

Do they? Have they dropped "corporate" solutions that barely work, sold in golf courses to people that are not affected in the least by their decisions? Are they still using XML (or even worse, CORBA) as duct tape tying everything together? Have they dropped waterfall? Do they allow developers to have their say on architectures and solutions to use? Can they experiment with, let's say, Scala, Elixir or are they stuck…

Those are absolutely the right questions to be asking, and in my experience the answers are mostly "yes".

Although from what I've heard, their version of moving from "waterfall" to "agile" could best be described as "iterative waterfall"

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#89

Post by pc86 » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

Is this an entire article based on a subtitle on the summary page of the CEO's presentation? Not a bad advertisement for GS but come on, this is incredibly light on content, by which I mean there is absolutely zero content.

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#90

Post by otakucode » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

Banks are tech companies. When other countries say that they trust the US dollar, what do you think that means? It means they trust that our IT systems which manage the dollar are correct. They trust that when we say Warren Buffet has eleventy billion dollars, it actually means something tangible.

And when they discover that trust is utterly and entirely misplaced, that our IT systems have been run as cost centers and endlessly rushed and slapped together and subjected to every form of intellectual rot that modern business practice could infuse into it.... well then things will get interesting. What if Walmart goes to pay off a supplier and the supplier asks for proof that the numbers Walmart is sending over the wire are actually backed by something and not just computational funny money? Well, we do have a form of money that's actually verifiably real and non-counterfeitable and doesn't just rely on some garbage IT....