2015 Q3 Recap
The third quarter of 2015 differed from 2014 in that both fulltime and contract hiring continued strongly at most firms through most of the quarter. In fact, at least two major investment banks conducted special hiring events to focus attention on their hiring needs and to fill as many open positions as possible before the end of the year. IT departments have run lean for the past few years with most hires focused on RTB (Run the Bank) and MCB (Mandatory Change the Bank = regulatory/compliance) initiatives. Firms are seeing more optimistic budgets and are hiring to address a large backlog of strategic work. That being said, as we enter the 4th Quarter, most of the big banks have frozen hiring, but there’s nothing unusual about hiring freezes at this time of year.
Treasury and Margin
Companies are investing in technology to manage their balance sheet and margin requirements more efficiently. The dollars involved are huge, so building systems that risk manage more effectively and compute margin more accurately can add significant $ to the bottom line.
Direct Submission
Ever wonder why your resume rarely gets a response when you submit it directly through a company’s job portal? We had an interesting insight into being on the other side of the submission process. Due to misconfiguration of our job portal at a major investment bank, we saw a subset of the direct submission activity. We observed that one individual had submitted his resume to over 500 posted positions. Clearly separating the wheat from the chaff is a non-trivial challenge.
Trends
The vast majority of the development positions we are asked to work on focus on five main languages: Java, C++, C#, Javascript, and Scala. Scala is clearly on the upswing as functional languages are becoming more popular driven by the explosion in parallel processing. Javascript continues to grow in popularity as it is the language of choice for modern front-ends.
Be sure to look at the scale of the Y axis when reading the charts below.
Apache Spark
One technology that is seeing rapid adoption is Apache Spark. If you want to be on trend, gaining experience with Scala and Apache Spark is a excellent way to go.
