JPMorgan Suffered Exodus of Tech Talent Before Breach by Hackers

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-05/jpmorgan-had-exodus-of-tech-talent-before-hacker-breach.html

by zabalmendi • 12 years ago

87 51 12 years ago

_random_2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

toomuchtodo2• 12 years ago

I was recently offered a DevOps job at Citidel making well over $150K/year in Chicago. I don't consider that as "janitorial".

nerfhammer• 12 years ago

I have known "IT people" on wall street who were making 200-300k

otakucode• 12 years 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!

lukasm2• 12 years 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.

VonGuard2• 12 years 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.

Retric• 12 years ago

Failing to migrate after a M&A is failure to invest in IT. It's a stupid, short sited, and expensive failure, but good luck finding banks willing to pay for it.

at-fates-hands• 12 years ago

>> 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!

I was at one large financial company similar to JPMo and every time the development team came up with a good idea, it was met with a laundry list of requirements we had to meet in order to show positive ROI over a very short time period. Not sure if they did to discourage us from trying to help processes and development, or they really believed redesigning some parts of their network architecture could be done in a month or two.

Either way, it was quite frustrating to say the least, and after a few gallant attempts to get something going, most of the younger developers just opted out and left. I saw the writing on the wall and was in the second wave of people who finally gave up and moved on.

wheaties• 12 years ago

JP pays programmers very well. In fact, it's very good for the counties in which those programmers are employed. Well, that is, if they were in a money center. Costs centers, like security and infrastructure, those places they minimize the costs! Part of minimizing costs is all about not paying for things that aren't expressly needed or killing programs that might make sense but cost too much.

I worked there for half a year before quitting and going back to a start up. Nice people but only the people at the top seem to have a clue as to what to fix and they, themselves, can only focus on so many things at once.

twistedpair• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Exactly. So many go along to get along types that progress will never be made.

Hansi• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

lukasm2• 12 years ago

You don't want to increase wages really. Improve quality of life.

refurb2• 12 years 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/SB1000142405270230402680...

MaysonL• 12 years 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.

innguest• 12 years 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).

ebiester• 12 years ago

That just means we will be tackling harder problems. The problems we were solving in the 70s were much simpler than the ones today. Today, we're handling things that we would have never considered possible before.

On the other hand, something that hasn't changed in 40 years is that end users are not able to precisely explain what they want. That is why we will always have jobs. There will always be some sort of exceptional rule.

jacques_chester• 12 years ago

it will be easier in the future

Complexity expands so as to fill our current mental capacity.

Each level of abstraction divides the cost per feature and so multiplies the sum of total complexity.

oh_sigh• 12 years ago

I suppose you're one of those people who think that drag and drop programming, or programming in english will be a reality?

coldcode• 12 years ago

"mathematically proven programs that do not require maintenance" - very funny.

PaulHoule• 12 years ago

I think the issue is not so much wages as it is respect, at least in IT.

jjoonathan• 12 years ago

Wages are a kind of respect. One that is very important.

enjoy-your-stay• 12 years 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_off...

skippy81• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

IT dept in GS is more efficient than JPM.

JPMorgan Suffered Exodus of Tech Talent Before Breach by Hackers

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