[l33r]

I would agree with what the author has said. That being said, I believe it takes a certain individual to grow inside a bank (because I'm one of them) and I think it is different between teams. If you are not smart (but hardworking and willing to learn), you will thrive inside a bank.

I have a liberal arts major at a large-public university and have a minor in computer science. My offer at a large bank was the best offer I got and I got placed in an operation/support role. I have been in my current role for over two years and this is my first "real job" outside of college.

Even though it is not Google/Microsoft/Amazon, I am extremely happy in the position I am in. The first two years were difficult and it is not the type of role I want to do for the rest of my life, but working at the bank had some benefits. I get paid overtime hours and get to work remotely whenever I want. If I had a family or significant other I would be miserable. Recently there has been a mass exodus and layoffs in our team (due to a "location strategy"). I am able to do the work that used to take 4-5 people and there is only one other person in the Western Hemisphere that does my job.

I support what the bank calls a "critical application". There's very high probability that your money has moved through this application. There has been a lot of work for me to do and have been given flexibility because I work hard and get the job done. I get paid overtime (100 hours of overtime this past month). Even though I am happy at the moment, I know my current role is unsustainable and I intend on moving to another team within the bank or externally (at the end of the year where I will probably lose my overtime eligibility).

Our company provides services for self-learning (which usually costs hundreds of dollars a year) and bi-annual hackathons which gives me an outlet for actually programming. A project I worked on in one of these hackathons got patented recently. I live in a major US city which has two major hackerspaces and a plethora of jobs and career networking events/MeetUps. Since I am doing so much overtime, I make more than my salary capped associates and application developers (who are my age) and my mortgage will be paid off by the end of this year. I think my next career move will be in application development with one of the many teams I support at the moment or move into consulting.

[flukus]

If this is your only programming job then there's a good chance you're oblivious to a lot of problems and at that level of experience you shouldn't be expected to know better.

One of those red flags is having junior Devs working unsupervised on critical stuff.

I don't mean to sound rude or condescending, just that you have a lot to learn and I very much doubt you're learning good lessons there.

[l33r]

I know I have a lot to learn. I am not a programmer for my job role. I program has a hobby. I run the operations side: support, deployments, and business analyst type work. I am not oblivious to the problems because I see all the problems when I am facing the product side of the business.