[suprememoocow]

Many of the sentiments expressed by the author are shared by developers and other technical staff working in the finance industry. In places like London and New York, finance has, for a long time, managed to get the best technical staff by paying the highest wages even if the work is less interesting. This has been detrimental to other industries in the same regions. As morale declines in finance firms, however, this is changing.

[ig1]

For a long time finance has been the place where the most interesting tech was going on (not to say there isn't a lot of boring bog standard stuff as well).

It's an industry where many firms have had to develop their own network transport layers, database engines, languages, etc. Where machine learning and big data have been standard practice for over a decade. Where understanding complexity and concurrency theory are important, and designing lock-free algorithms can be a daily activity. There's very few areas of core CS that aren't used in investment banks.

[svanderwaal]

I'm wondering if any of that work has been made available, eg. as an open source project? There's a standard practice among tech/web companies to share innovation on the infrastructural level, but I cannot name one example of a bank innovating openly in that way. Perhaps they do publish academic papers about their innovations?

[suprememoocow]

I've been contracting in the finance industry in London for seven years (at four firms) and although financial companies are some of the biggest users of open-source software, it's almost unheard of for firms to contribute back to open-source projects. There are a few progressive companies but unfortunately I've not worked at any of them.

Many firms have a strict policy of disallowing any source (open or not) from leaving company premises. Email servers and proxy filters have detectors that will raise an alert if source code is emailed or sent out over HTTP. It's easily a sackable offence and this discourages developers from contributing changes back to open-source: there are simply too many hurdles to jump through in order to do it.

[cheatercheater]

Given your experience, what would you say are the top 5 techs that are being used in this area in London? I was looking at the job market a while back but it's not very transparent. How do you best go about finding a job of this kind?

[gaius]

Sure, here's one example http://www.aplusdev.org/

But the real influence of banking is driving the development of stuff like RDMA over Infiniband, which eventually makes its way into other industries. Everything that "web companies" know (and take for granted) about scalability, performance, resilience, security etc etc comes from either investment banking or pr0n.

[ig1]

There are some examples such as:

https://www.openadaptor.org/

But obviously a lot of it remains behind closed doors, but there certainly some of that sort of thing going on.

Some of it also happens indirectly, for example a bank might design an improvement to the Linux kernel but because they want to remain covered by their support contract with say RedHat they might supply to the patch to RedHat and RedHat will then verify it and merge it into their core release and submit it back upstream, but it would have RedHat's name on it rather than the originating bank who might want to remain anonymous.

[xadhominemx]

Not really what you're thinking of but in similar spirit:

https://ocaml.janestreet.com/

[VaibhavZ]

Im not sure about publishing of papers on innovations but there is constant work going on to improve the database systems and few people I know have come up with software programs to check the bankruptcy!

[suprememoocow]

You are right - that is very true.

In most large finance companies though, it's also true that a lot of the less-exciting back office development work is being done by software developers who are overqualified for the roles but attracted by high wages.