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The Lag — My Brief Experience Working in Financial Tech
I believe it is important that I preface this article by stating that the opinions in this article are solely my own and do not represent that of any organization or other individuals.
If you were to ask my freshmen college self, if I could envision working at an investment bank, I would have scoffed. However, in early 2020, a haphazard chain of unrelated events and a desire for radical change drove me to taking on a full-time position as a software engineer at a legacy investing giant in New York City. I did not stay there for long.
I came in as an enthusiastic, full stack engineer for a front office team. The group I worked for focused on building software workflows for various financial tradeables. During my time, I enjoyed talking with many people in the field and butting heads with financial engineers. While I obviously can’t go into the technical details, working at this finance giant gave me some understanding of the state of financial technology (a.k.a. fintech). Most of the points and lessons in this post are based on anecdotal experience, but I hope to deliver some insight into the current state of legacy finance companies and the culture that propels them to their present state.
In the engineering world, it is a common trope that government related and financial technologies tend to be…
