[kwant_kiddo]

Worked in a similar organisation also. The culture in european banks is even more dull than I expected before working there.

The view on technology and infrastructure is very primitive... as you can also read from just the header "IT division". I initially thought that they were competent but greedy turns out the banks are really just greedy, naive and sometimes... plain stupid.

I don't know if it's unique to Europe, but I am never working for a non tech-first company again.

[rnd33]

Same experience, putting everything related to tech (printers, programming, Wifi, email) into the "IT department", which is seen as a support service to the core business of banking, instead of seeing automation as business critical in reducing overhead and managing risk.

This is why fintech (although a very overused word by now) is such a breath of fresh air in the banking industry, and desperately needed.

[eru]

> The culture in european banks is even more dull than I expected before working there.

> I don't know if it's unique to Europe, but I am never working for a non tech-first company again.

For what it's worth, Goldman Sachs is reasonably competent in tech, and used to be even more so (at least in relative terms).

Bloomberg is about half-way between the banks and the more competent tech companies.

(I worked at both, and a few other financial companies and also at Google, Facebook etc.)

[LaurensBER]

Working on the buy side, I can tell you that GS is definitely not competent anymore, with all the cost cutting going on. Getting a bunch of CSV files on a SFTP server seems to be extremally challenging for them. Getting the numbers to match with what we're getting over email/on the website is impossible.

It's so bad that they're losing serious business on this despite being competitive on fees and service.

Bloomberg is great if you're big and bring a lot of money to the table. For any small/mid-size firm (think less than 5M ARR on Bloomberg licenses) the answer for even basic requests is often "we'll file an enhancement request" only for things to disappear and never get adjusted. To give an example, it's still not possible to get an hourly export of the trade history in CSV or XML on a SFTP server. There's workarounds but it's definitely not half-way competent.

[eru]

> Working on the buy side, I can tell you that GS is definitely not competent anymore, with all the cost cutting going on.

I last worked there in 2018. So my experience is a bit out-of-date.

> Bloomberg is great if you're big and bring a lot of money to the table.

My experience is from working inside of Bloomberg and trying to get stuff done. I don't know how it looks like from the outside.

Though I can tell you that eg Google was more competent on the inside when I was working there (in 2014 to 2016); but from the outside they are probably not easier to work with than Bloomberg?

[kwant_kiddo]

I almost wrote a non-US company. In general I must say that working for tech in European firms vs US firms is night and day, but that is another discussion :)

[zeisss]

Willing to elaborate a bit on this?

[mardifoufs]

Not the person you asked but in my limited experience, tech is actually valued in the US. Sure, there is also a culture of MBAs and business types taking decisions, but they at least understand that tech is essential (regardless of the reason).

In Europe, tech is seen as "just IT" especially in non tech corporations. It's much less important than in the US.

It's a pretty minor thing but personally I think just the fact that I rarely see the distinction between "software engineering/development" and "IT" in Europe is pretty telling.

The salaries are also another indicator.