Big Bank Software Engineering Unpopular Opinions | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about working as a software engineer in big banks?
Answer:
Here are some genuinely unpopular (or at least rarely voiced openly) opinions from engineers who have spent years inside large investment and commercial banks:
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The pay is good but rarely “life-changing” compared to top tech. Once you adjust for the grueling hours, high taxes in financial hubs (NYC, London), and the cost of living, many senior engineers at banks make less per hour than mid-level engineers at FAANG/Magnit 7 companies. A $450k total comp package at Goldman or JPM sounds huge until you realize it often includes 70–80 hour weeks during release cycles and a bonus that can swing 50% based on factors you don’t control.
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The tech is often better than people think—but in the wrong places. Everyone mocks COBOL and mainframes, but the reality is that core trading, payments, and risk systems frequently run on extremely well-engineered, low-latency, high-availability platforms (think C++, Java, Scala, kdb+, or custom distributed systems) that would make most “cool” fintech startups blush. The boring consumer banking apps and internal tools, however, are usually the disaster zones everyone hears about.
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Politics and hierarchy are worse than at most tech companies. Titles matter enormously (VP → Director → MD is a caste system), and promotions are often tied more to “face time,” who you golf with, and revenue attribution than pure technical merit. Many brilliant engineers stall forever at “Associate” or “VP” because they refuse to play the game.
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Job security is a myth. Banks do mass layoffs constantly (2023–2025 waves at Citi, Barclays, Deutsche, Goldman, etc.). The “golden handcuffs” narrative is overstated; bonuses can be zeroed out, and entire tech teams get offshored or vendored with little warning.
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Work-life balance is frequently better than at hedge funds or Big Tech for certain roles. If you land in a slow-moving regulatory, compliance, or middle-office tech team, you can coast with genuine 9–5 hours and almost no on-call. People only hear the horror stories from front-office trading-tech teams.
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Innovation is actively punished. Trying to introduce modern practices (Kubernetes, public cloud at scale, trunk-based development, etc.) often triggers months of compliance, risk, and architecture review theater. The safest career move is to keep the legacy system limping along exactly as-is.
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Most “fintech disruption” is irrelevant to the parts of the bank that actually make money. The real profits still come from trading, prime brokerage, securities services, and treasury—areas where the tech is already sophisticated and the barriers to entry are regulatory, not technical.
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A surprising number of engineers stay 10–20 years and are perfectly happy. They like the fat paycheck, the prestige on a resume, the ability to buy an apartment in Manhattan or London, and the fact that—compared to startups—failure rarely kills the company or your equity.
These opinions tend to be unpopular because they clash with two dominant internet narratives: (1) “big banks are dinosaur employers paying peanuts for soul-crushing COBOL work,” and (2) “big banks pay the absolute most money in tech, period.” Reality is far more nuanced and role/team/location-dependent.
References:
- Discussions on TeamBlind “Investment Banking” forum (2023–2025 threads)
- eFinancialCareers articles on banking layoffs and compensation (2024–2025)
- Personal accounts from former engineers at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, etc., shared on Reddit r/cscareerquestions and private Slack/Discord groups