First impressions and experiences after joining Julius Baer
Hi! My name is Claudio and I recently joined the Software Engineering Center of Excellence (CoE) team at Julius Baer in Zurich as a .NET Software Engineer. In this article I would like to share with you my first impressions about how it is radically different working at Julius Baer, compared to what you would think about the work environment of a traditional bank.
A 1-sentence bio
I hold a MS degree in Computer Science and have eight years of experience in the banking software industry.
First preconception: Management is not tech-savvy
Throughout the interview process many aspects convinced me that joining Julius Baer was a good move, but one aspect in particular made me realize that the bank would have been different: the technical expertise and commitment shown during the interview sessions by management. In fact, I had one session with two managers entirely dedicated to present in VERY technical details the projects I would have worked on, the environment and, most importantly, the vision.
Once I joined, I experienced that the words “big enough to matter, yet small enough to care” are more than just a front-office motto: management lines are short and occasions to talk with members of senior management quite frequent. Corporate communication is very professional, but never abstract. The goals given to the teams are challenging, but always realistic and backed by careful estimations: there is a big drive to grow from everyone and there is the expectation that everyone is motivated to develop themselves further.
Second preconception: HR is “far away”
I was very pleased to get to know that in Julius Baer every employee can raise HR-related questions to an HR contact that is guaranteed to be an expert of all the regulations that you are subject to. This makes interactions with HR easy and rapid.
Third preconception: the hardware is outdated
When thinking about the work of a developer in a highly regulated environment, I always thought that there are some “necessary pain points” I would have had to live with, like having to work on highly restricted and outdated machines, with a lot of roadblocks to get the job done. Instead, as a member of the CoE team I have been given budget and full freedom to choose the machine I wanted to work on, and thanks to Julius Baer’s DevCloud infrastructure I can develop and deploy my code from anywhere, interact with my colleagues and have meetings without having to be connected to the bank network.
Fourth preconception: the software is outdated
The project I have been assigned to is a .NET-based project that set its roots in the early 2000s. While there are few parts that are considered “legacy”, most of the components have been carefully maintained and refactored over the years to keep up with the design trends. On top of that, the technical expertise is high and so is the bar you need to reach to get your code changes accepted: this ensures that
- quality is high
- knowledge is shared
Thanks to the parallelization of work enabled by a clean DDD design, the teams are transitioning the project piece by piece towards a cloud-native solution hosted in a hybrid cloud environment.
While all team members have their area of expertise , I was pleased to see that there are frequent exchange meetings to present and to learn about selected new topic that others are dealing with; the value of these sessions is in my opinion extremely high and, in the long run, those sessions empower the teams to embrace a real DevOps culture, where everyone can step in and support when and where needed.
Fifth preconception: “agile” is only a buzzword
Today, everyone claims to be agile, but only few know what being agile means. At Julius Baer, the organization follows the SAFe methodology almost “by the book”, and teams are guided by full-time “agilists” that ensure the methodology does not derail in an almost-agile one. And to make sure that everyone knows the process and its ceremonies in every detail, the company encourages new joiners to attend a SAFe training and to get certified.
Overall, as of now it is for me very hard to find things I wished were different. Despite the pandemic-related restrictions that could have negatively impacted my initial settling in Julius Baer, I was able to find people, a culture and a project that are outstanding and that have everything that is needed to have a fruitful and long-lasting working experience together.
