In happier news, I have pretty much been offered a job. I'll be doing development for interfaces to FX feeds, I think. My team is a bit split at the moment, so I don't really know where they'll place me. At the moment, I'm writing an automated testing tool that'll allow us to test SSIS packages, which I'm actually finding really fun.
As part of the graduate program, we are required to find a permanent role at the end of our last rotation. I think the graduate management team realised that if all of us start looking for roles at the same time, it would lead to 100+ people all competing for the same few roles, so they decided to let us roll off earlier if we managed to find a place. Since I'll be staying in my current rotation, they want to wait until the program ends before giving me my permanent role, because that way the graduate program will continue to "pay" for me, so I'll have to wait a few more months before I get a pay rise.
It's a bit stupid how they have organised the grad program. They merged some of the business and technology areas into one area, and hired grads under a "generalist" umbrella - meaning they didn't care what you studied at university, they'll take you and place you somewhere. However, since all the banks are currently going through a technology overhaul to get rid of ageing systems, a large amount of roles are in technology. Having talked to a lot of the grads during various grad catch-ups, I think I'm the only developer (and I wouldn't even consider myself one, if someone were to ask me. There's the one class, one method guy, but I don't count him). I know a couple of people who can test, and semi-enjoy it. I haven't met anyone who wants to do support. So basically a majority of the graduate program wants to be a business analyst, or project manager.
That would be fine, except for the fact that everyone is cutting costs, which means less projects, which means less BAs are required. So you have a bulk of the jobs being in dev, testing or support, and a bulk of the new hires wanting to be BAs. I'm just really curious about the entire hiring process for the graduate program. It's no secret that there is a shortage of dev/test/support staff.
I've been thinking a lot about someone's last blog post, where they said that they can code, but never seem to be able to get a job. They thought they were being talkative during an interview, but got feedback that they didn't talk very much. It also made me think of someone from the #se440 group who I think is a great coder, but is really quiet most of the time. The most animated I've seen him was when he was arguing with Yaksha about something, and even then, I think I generally talk more than he did then.
The current interview system for finding grads in this climate is stupid. One of the grads in my year was convinced he was going to roll off into a senior management role. Grad meetings with the leadership team were just a chance for me and the Arnie twins to play buzzword bingo during his brown-nosing. We nicknamed him "The Congressman", because he loves to ask stupid questions about U.S. politics to make it sound like he's intelligent. But if even I can tell that he's pulling stuff out of his ass, I'm amazed that everyone else can keep a straight face. Yet this is the type of person who gets hired.
Coffee Nick finds it funny that they tell each year of grad that they're tomorrow's leaders, and whenever they are introduced to past grads, it never occurs to them to wonder why that grad is still only a "lowly" senior support analyst. If only they would do the maths: for a company of thousands of people, there is only one CEO, and he might have a team under him of about ten people. That means to get into one of those positions, you need to wait for one of them to die/retire/quit. Not to mention the long line of people waiting to be promoted. It's like you're a distant, distant, distant, distant cousin of the royal family trying to make it to the throne. I wouldn't hold my breath.
They need to stop looking for tomorrow's leaders, and start looking for people who can actually accomplish something.
Thinking about it, Person got into the grad program because he's good with people. Paul and Tong got rejected because they're actually competent. Sumeet got in, but then again, he also got into Microsoft, so it's hard to say whether they only pick incompetent, sociable people. But I'm horrible with people, and a terrible developer. MrMan5.5 says I'm just not a technical person, and I agree. I definitely have no aspiration to be the next CEO of anything. I asked my manager what job he would have if he could have any job and not have to worry about things like how much he earns, or the hours, or opportunities for promotion, and without hesitation, he said he'd like to be one of those outdoors tour guides. I have no idea what I would do. I wonder why they picked me. I wonder what it means that I got rejected at first.
Unlike the blogger I mentioned above, I can't really do anything. If I were completely honest with myself, he could probably do my job at least five times as well, and yet I'm the one who goes into the office five days a week, and he isn't. Doesn't make much sense, does it?
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