Banking Software Engineering Unpopular Opinions | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about working as a software engineer in the banking industry?
Answer:
Here are some genuinely unpopular (but commonly held in private) opinions from software engineers who have worked in banks (investment banks, retail banks, and fintech arms of traditional banks):
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Banking pays well but is one of the least efficient places to work as an engineer.
The money is great (especially in IB), but you’ll spend 30–60% of your time on compliance theater, change-management paperwork, and waiting for approvals that add zero technical value. -
Most “fintech innovation” in big banks is marketing, not real engineering.
Banks love slapping “digital transformation” on legacy COBOL systems wrapped in a React frontend and calling it revolutionary. Actual greenfield work is rare and usually killed by risk/compliance. -
The tech stack is often 10–20 years behind “normal” tech companies, and that’s by design.
Stability and auditability trump performance or developer experience. You’ll maintain Java 8 monoliths or mainframes not because leadership is clueless, but because regulators love things that never change. -
Work-life balance is often better than at FAANG/startups, and people won’t admit it.
Despite the stereotypes, many banking IT roles have strict 9–5 (or even 10–4) hours, unlimited PTO you can actually take, and almost no on-call compared to tech. The trade-off is soul-crushing bureaucracy. -
A lot of banking engineers are “coasting” and proud of it.
High pay + low pressure + job security = golden handcuffs. Senior titles with 400k+ TC for writing SQL and attending meetings is common. Effort is punished more than rewarded. -
Regulatory constraints make good architecture impossible.
You can’t break monoliths because every system is “critical.” You can’t use open-source without a 6-month legal review. You can’t deploy without 17 sign-offs. The result: technical debt is not a bug, it’s a feature. -
The real product is compliance, not software.
Your customer is not the end-user or even the business—it’s the regulator. If the software works perfectly but fails an audit, you lose. If it barely works but has perfect paperwork, you win. -
Diversity hiring initiatives sometimes lower the technical bar more obviously than in pure tech companies.
Because banking is desperate to hit DEI numbers under regulatory scrutiny, and the interview process is already less rigorous than FAANG, the competence variance can be extreme. -
Contractors and off-shore teams do 80% of the actual coding, permanent staff mostly do governance.
The “prestigious” full-time role is often translating business requirements into tickets for teams in India or Poland, then reviewing their work. -
Most people would take a 50% pay cut to leave and never do—because they couldn’t get the same money elsewhere with their outdated skills.
The longer you stay, the more trapped you become.
These opinions are rarely said out loud in public (especially on LinkedIn) because the paychecks are too good and the industry is small, but they’re extremely common in anonymous forums (Blind, Reddit r/cscareerquestions, banking Slack channels, etc.).
References:
- TeamBlind – “Investment Banking Tech” threads
- Reddit r/cscareerquestions – banking search
- Wall Street Oasis – Technology forums