Working hours in big financial organizations
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Hello people..I need some insight about the life of software developers working in financial organizations like Merrill Lynch, Goldmen Sache etc; particularly working hours. Actually i have an offer from Merrill Lynch for their software development office in singapore. Someone told me that software people working in financial organizations are usually "abused" as far as working hours and work load is concerned (on average 14 hours a day). I will be moving to singapore with just my wife and i dont want to ruin my family life by working so long. In my current company,i do sometimes work long hours but company in general doesnt encourage late sittings until unless its required. Do you thinks that what happens with us(software developers) in financial companies like banks etc? People plz share whatever you know in this regard. And please do mention if you work for some financial company like a bank etc. SK
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Hello people..I need some insight about the life of software developers working in financial organizations like Merrill Lynch, Goldmen Sache etc; particularly working hours. Actually i have an offer from Merrill Lynch for their software development office in singapore. Someone told me that software people working in financial organizations are usually "abused" as far as working hours and work load is concerned (on average 14 hours a day). I will be moving to singapore with just my wife and i dont want to ruin my family life by working so long. In my current company,i do sometimes work long hours but company in general doesnt encourage late sittings until unless its required. Do you thinks that what happens with us(software developers) in financial companies like banks etc? People plz share whatever you know in this regard. And please do mention if you work for some financial company like a bank etc. SK
I used to work for Citibank in the US, and 40 hours was the norm except during quarter end, when sometimes programs bombed out so we would work late. In the US I think SW developers are expected to work overtime if a project is behind schedule, but I don't know of any company where it is the norm. Perhaps that is the culture of the area?
______________________ stuff + cats = awesome
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I used to work for Citibank in the US, and 40 hours was the norm except during quarter end, when sometimes programs bombed out so we would work late. In the US I think SW developers are expected to work overtime if a project is behind schedule, but I don't know of any company where it is the norm. Perhaps that is the culture of the area?
______________________ stuff + cats = awesome
leckey wrote:
but I don't know of any company where it is the norm.
When the company that I worked for ages ago hired an offical Engineering Manager, he gave me a bad review because I wasn't putting in 75 hour work weeks. I kid you not. I took that to the president and threatened to sue his arse off. That worked very well. Marc
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leckey wrote:
but I don't know of any company where it is the norm.
When the company that I worked for ages ago hired an offical Engineering Manager, he gave me a bad review because I wasn't putting in 75 hour work weeks. I kid you not. I took that to the president and threatened to sue his arse off. That worked very well. Marc
I worked for a financial firm in the WTC, and was told "Wall Street is not a 9 to 5 job" after I finished my workload before 5 and left with the other 6 million NY'ers. It seemed like most others didn't start working until 5 pm. They came in the same time as me, but jerked around for 8 hours while I worked. The worst part was that they made all developers rotate on-call overnights. The reason was they had jobs and reports to be run overnight. If anything happened, the clueless overnight guys had no idea what to do if something went wrong. Instead of troubleshooting and fixing the problem, they would call the developer and the entire system halted until the developer showed up. I conveniently shut my beeper off EVERY night. I refused to be called because of the incompetent overnight people. My managers were actually upset when I developed a fault schedule that would figure out how long each task took to complete, and skipped them based on priority. It was exactly what the developer would do, but didn't need a developer to be bothered. In fact, it didn't need any overnight people either.
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Hello people..I need some insight about the life of software developers working in financial organizations like Merrill Lynch, Goldmen Sache etc; particularly working hours. Actually i have an offer from Merrill Lynch for their software development office in singapore. Someone told me that software people working in financial organizations are usually "abused" as far as working hours and work load is concerned (on average 14 hours a day). I will be moving to singapore with just my wife and i dont want to ruin my family life by working so long. In my current company,i do sometimes work long hours but company in general doesnt encourage late sittings until unless its required. Do you thinks that what happens with us(software developers) in financial companies like banks etc? People plz share whatever you know in this regard. And please do mention if you work for some financial company like a bank etc. SK
Where I work it is great. I work for an insurance company. We get payed for 40 hours but are only expected to work a minimum of 35. It is salary so we do not get any compensation for over-time because 5 hours we don't have to work. I've been here for two years and I can count on both hands the number of times I had to stay over only a couple of hours to get project done. We have do had due dates but we the only absolute ones are formally announced projects that are given several months in advance of the due date.
Brett A. Whittington Application Developer
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Hello people..I need some insight about the life of software developers working in financial organizations like Merrill Lynch, Goldmen Sache etc; particularly working hours. Actually i have an offer from Merrill Lynch for their software development office in singapore. Someone told me that software people working in financial organizations are usually "abused" as far as working hours and work load is concerned (on average 14 hours a day). I will be moving to singapore with just my wife and i dont want to ruin my family life by working so long. In my current company,i do sometimes work long hours but company in general doesnt encourage late sittings until unless its required. Do you thinks that what happens with us(software developers) in financial companies like banks etc? People plz share whatever you know in this regard. And please do mention if you work for some financial company like a bank etc. SK
As a contractor I've always had the philosophy that if you want me to work n hours, pay for n hours. That was fine until about 2001 when the business went a bit odd after 911. Then we started to get day rate. Fine, I just had the number of hours I would work for a specific rate written into the contract. That way, if they wanted me to work 10 hours I could charge for the extra time. After all, you wouldn't pay a lawyer for 8 hours then exect them to just work another 2 for nothing, would you? Anyway, I often hear about a 'professional' day. Bollocks: it's just a businesses way of screwing free hours out of you. Very disrespectful. Although today was my last day it was a good place to work as they were quite mindful of work-life balance and I worked 8 to 4 with an hour for lunch. If I ever worked longer (which they rarely asked for) I would and they let me accumulate or trade hours. Fair. So, if we all stopped letting these morons take the piss we could get back to a time when we got paid hourly and had no problem with 60 hour weeks because we got the respect that only having to pay for something brings.
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Hello people..I need some insight about the life of software developers working in financial organizations like Merrill Lynch, Goldmen Sache etc; particularly working hours. Actually i have an offer from Merrill Lynch for their software development office in singapore. Someone told me that software people working in financial organizations are usually "abused" as far as working hours and work load is concerned (on average 14 hours a day). I will be moving to singapore with just my wife and i dont want to ruin my family life by working so long. In my current company,i do sometimes work long hours but company in general doesnt encourage late sittings until unless its required. Do you thinks that what happens with us(software developers) in financial companies like banks etc? People plz share whatever you know in this regard. And please do mention if you work for some financial company like a bank etc. SK
Bugs increas exponentially every hour over a standard working day - if they want you to work a 14 hour day they are going to get a bug sandwich. Developers are like surgeons and airline pilots: best when rested.
'--8<------------------------ Ex Datis: Duncan Jones Merrion Computing Ltd
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Hello people..I need some insight about the life of software developers working in financial organizations like Merrill Lynch, Goldmen Sache etc; particularly working hours. Actually i have an offer from Merrill Lynch for their software development office in singapore. Someone told me that software people working in financial organizations are usually "abused" as far as working hours and work load is concerned (on average 14 hours a day). I will be moving to singapore with just my wife and i dont want to ruin my family life by working so long. In my current company,i do sometimes work long hours but company in general doesnt encourage late sittings until unless its required. Do you thinks that what happens with us(software developers) in financial companies like banks etc? People plz share whatever you know in this regard. And please do mention if you work for some financial company like a bank etc. SK
I used to work at Bear Sterns. The hours were pretty reasonable in my group.... For some odd reason I never cared enough to understand, we had a second dev team and they were worked like dogs 10+ hours a day. If I were you I'd ask if you can talk further with your potential co-workers and ask them honestly what the hours and conditions are like. I hope this helps.
My Blog A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - -Lazarus Long
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I worked for a financial firm in the WTC, and was told "Wall Street is not a 9 to 5 job" after I finished my workload before 5 and left with the other 6 million NY'ers. It seemed like most others didn't start working until 5 pm. They came in the same time as me, but jerked around for 8 hours while I worked. The worst part was that they made all developers rotate on-call overnights. The reason was they had jobs and reports to be run overnight. If anything happened, the clueless overnight guys had no idea what to do if something went wrong. Instead of troubleshooting and fixing the problem, they would call the developer and the entire system halted until the developer showed up. I conveniently shut my beeper off EVERY night. I refused to be called because of the incompetent overnight people. My managers were actually upset when I developed a fault schedule that would figure out how long each task took to complete, and skipped them based on priority. It was exactly what the developer would do, but didn't need a developer to be bothered. In fact, it didn't need any overnight people either.
ednrgc wrote:
conveniently shut my beeper off EVERY night. I refused to be called because of the incompetent overnight people.
Ahh the days of pagers... When I worked at TI I often lost my pager :) The Horror!
My Blog A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - -Lazarus Long
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leckey wrote:
but I don't know of any company where it is the norm.
When the company that I worked for ages ago hired an offical Engineering Manager, he gave me a bad review because I wasn't putting in 75 hour work weeks. I kid you not. I took that to the president and threatened to sue his arse off. That worked very well. Marc
Marc Clifton wrote:
he gave me a bad review because I wasn't putting in 75 hour work weeks.
I had one of those conversation once as well. Except, she refused to put it into writing so I wouldn't allow her to end the review until she raised my performance rating or put her "concern" into writing.
My Blog A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - -Lazarus Long
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Hello people..I need some insight about the life of software developers working in financial organizations like Merrill Lynch, Goldmen Sache etc; particularly working hours. Actually i have an offer from Merrill Lynch for their software development office in singapore. Someone told me that software people working in financial organizations are usually "abused" as far as working hours and work load is concerned (on average 14 hours a day). I will be moving to singapore with just my wife and i dont want to ruin my family life by working so long. In my current company,i do sometimes work long hours but company in general doesnt encourage late sittings until unless its required. Do you thinks that what happens with us(software developers) in financial companies like banks etc? People plz share whatever you know in this regard. And please do mention if you work for some financial company like a bank etc. SK
I have no experience working for a financial organization or working in singapore. But a friend of mine is working in financial industry as a software developer. she worked in singapore for a couple of year and she said it is very normal to have 12 to 15 hours of workday. everybody put that many hours. But when she moved to New York, she was very surprised to see normal working hours and as a matter of fact she was bored for sometimes initially :) so i guess it's the culture of the country and not the industry. Ankita
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Hello people..I need some insight about the life of software developers working in financial organizations like Merrill Lynch, Goldmen Sache etc; particularly working hours. Actually i have an offer from Merrill Lynch for their software development office in singapore. Someone told me that software people working in financial organizations are usually "abused" as far as working hours and work load is concerned (on average 14 hours a day). I will be moving to singapore with just my wife and i dont want to ruin my family life by working so long. In my current company,i do sometimes work long hours but company in general doesnt encourage late sittings until unless its required. Do you thinks that what happens with us(software developers) in financial companies like banks etc? People plz share whatever you know in this regard. And please do mention if you work for some financial company like a bank etc. SK
I currently work for one of the big wall street firms (Not the ones you named, but very similar), and here's the trick I've found... If you work in the actual IT department, you'll end up working long hours, working weekends, working late nights, etc. If you get in on the business side (I'm the lone programmer for a small convertible arbitrage fund within the firm), you can get probably get away with 8:30-5:30, unless something goes wrong. Most of the smaller departments will have a few programmers on staff to write their custom apps, while the actual IT department writes the firm-wide applications and services. Of course, it really depends on the environment you're going for. If you're comfortable being judge, jury, and executioner (Designer, developer, and support), and you've got the skills to back it up, business side is better (And pays better). If you're more comfortable working in large teams on large projects, be prepared for long hours. It might be different in other firms, of course...