Don’t You Fancy Getting Your Hands Dirty?
Tech expertise and the paradox of career progression
Getting your hands dirty is great, they say. I respect software developers, but I have more important things to do nowadays.
Maybe it’s just me, but have you noticed that as software engineers in financial services progress through their careers they often lose touch with their own profession? How did something that once held so much fascination become so dirty?
While the financial industry needed the technology to work and was willing to pay a little bit more to ensure that it would, we all knew where the real money and prestige lay — in the business. And so what was the ambitious technologist to do?
I think for many of us, the answer was to get as close to the business as possible and not to risk our career on an engineering-focused path. Consequently, as we rose in seniority we grew further from our core passion. Somewhere along the journey perhaps we came to think of engineering as a lower value, commoditized activity.
Something perhaps, just a little bit dirty.
Contrast that attitude with our likely competitors today. Technology giants, led by passionate engineers, continue to embarrass the incumbent. Though they have not yet fully turned their attention to finance, they are eagerly eyeing our market share.
And crucially, by investing in some of the best engineers in the world, they demonstrate orders of magnitude more value than by hiring the average. While salaries at the top end of technology are scaling much more slowly.
Now, as large financial players, we have been re-inventing ourselves. We have launched a raft of innovation labs and fintech partnerships and this is certainly a good thing. But the cost of our technical debt is high. Simple measures such as unnecessary code bloat and the lack of self-testing are familiar examples.
And — just like financial debt — the interest payment can overwhelm, dampening our agility and tending our systems toward bankruptcy. Many years of high risk re-engineering are needed. Years, perhaps we quietly think to ourselves, we can no longer afford.
So what are we to do? What if we as technology leaders have been hands-off for a while? Where exactly is the leadership going to come from, beyond hiring it in from other industries? Is it enough to tell our juniors
go forth and innovate!
if we ourselves don’t know how these technologies work? How will we inoculate ourselves against the threat of marketing hype, and distinguish genuine usefulness?
I don’t have all the answers and I welcome your suggestions. But firstly, I suggest — no matter our seniority — we should all continue to write code and experiment with new technologies. We’ve run hiring hackathons for new college graduates. How about a hackathon for senior technology leadership? How about setting some innovation metrics for ourselves, personally?
Secondly, we have to innovate our culture. Learning the business is not enough to guarantee our firm’s success because the financial business is quickly transforming into the technology business. Engineers need to be in-house leaders of that transformation. I always tell my teams: development is king. Be proud of your coding skill; learn to express its power at all levels of the organization.
I sometimes hear people say, with all their other responsibilities: “I’d love to, but I simply don’t have the time”. Think about it this way. The technology — orders of magnitude more powerful — is now simpler than ever to use. Imagine you grew up, as I did, crafting assembler with only 3000 transistors, just so you could draw out the Mandlebrot set with a pinch of extra speed. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you can now, for example, stand up a meaningful machine learning POC in the cloud for almost no cost.
Finally, perhaps we can take some inspiration from Singapore’s very own Lee Hsien Loong. Ostensibly in the business of running a country, he nevertheless took time a few years ago to write a C++ Sudoku solver. Beyond exciting a mini media sensation, his effort lent a genuine authenticity to the country’s transformation mission into a global fintech hub.
If a prime minister is willing to go hands-on in public, why not the rest of us?
