The Caveat of Technical Operations at Trading Firms
It’s the white whale of the recruiting world. We’ve all reported sightings. We’ve all spoken to the managers that want them. We all have the specs. The bones of old resumes, along with evolution itself, suggest they’re out there.
I speak of technical operations support engineers.
Rather than ask what they do, the better question to ask is what they don’t do. Etched between helpdesk and system admins, they carry the burden of responsibility that falls just beyond the scope of either position. On the helpdesk side this means coming to the rescue of a defeated desktop guy once he’s elected to pass the issue onto a higher power. On the admin side it means being the agent operating under the overseer. You do his dirty work. You get into the guts of the system when Houston says there’s a problem.
Oftentimes such a task involves writing ad hoc scripts on clunky code. BASH can’t handle it. Efforts with VB are equally futile.
Enter Perl and Python: the spinal cords of the support world.
Proficiency in one of these two languages creates the Maginot Line between helpdesk and technical operations. The second you write a script in either language, Perl or Python, everything changes. Responsibility, demand, you name it. Even your salary, which you can expect to increase tens of thousands of dollars, will never be the same.
That’s all well and good on paper, but here’s the problem. Perl and Python are gateway languages. They foster yearnings to enter the software engineering field. Before you know it Joshua Bloch is in their hands and Scott Meyers is sitting close by on the shelf. Your beloved technical operations engineer who cleans up all that crappy code has started to dream about C++ or java. By that point you’ve lost them.
Then there is the category of people that will do it, but don’t want to do it. These include software engineers that haven’t been able to get a job doing what they want to do. The problem with this is twofold. Employers aren’t stupid. They do not want to hire anyone for a job when they know it isn’t what the candidate wants to do. The other issue is that most of the people who qualify as wanting to do it are foreign nationals. They require sponsorship. In a world where H1B visas are hard to come by people in these positions aren’t getting them. They go to the Phds and people doing sexier work. Let’s be realistic here, the second you eliminate foreigners from a talent pool in the tech space, you’re kinking the main spout of candidate flow.
The other problem with foreigners in the IT space is that perhaps more than any other position it is a job heavily gauged on communication. You are always working phones, explaining things to people that don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about, all that type of stuff. Any indicator that you do not speak crystal clear English, where a manager would have to think whether someone would have a problem understanding you on the phone…you’re out. IT jobs aren’t sit in the corner and code with your head down and your headphones on, come talk to me when you’ve designed some killer algorithms kind of thing. There’s a business tinge, a personality element, which cannot go unidentified when a recruiter is doing the vetting process.
Trading firms, hedge funds, and most especially brokerage houses are hardly 9-5 operations. Most of the bigger places trade Asian hours, which translated to tech languages means you need to be open to the graveyard shift. Unfortunately, someone otherwise super-qualified who is doing something by day isn’t going to up and leave to become a zombie.
It gets better. Financial companies have high academic standards. True, not everyone needs a phd, but you best believe almost everyone needs a bachelor’s. IT has and continues to be one of the few refuges for the certificate holders and the Associate degree holders, but that’s fading fast. But for the most part they are held to relatively high academic credentials as well. If you come across a req, again often few and far between, that doesn’t require a bachelor’s, they want what is called “equivalent experience”, as if there is some human resources balance beam that every resume goes on. What this means is they will not take a chance on a guy until someone else has already taken a chance on the guy and given them work experience.
Now the best for last. The few candidates that are actually qualified, meaning they are US citizens or green cards, they are open to rotating shifts, they can script in perl or python, they speak with the clarity of a news anchor, they want the job, guess what…they are getting paid a ton of money at their current position. Technical operations support engineers have a value like Derek Jeter. They cannot be gauged by numbers or stats, their value and worth can only be understood by seeing them go about their business every day and finding a way to make things run smoothly.
Some would say this is intangibles. You get promoted internally based on intangibles; you get discretionary bonuses and base salary bumps based on intangibles…but you don’t get hired at other companies based on intangibles. So what happens is a stalemate. The good candidates are purposely priced out of the market by their current employers to force them to stay. Moreover, potential employers are reluctant to pay anywhere close to the type of salary they’re already making.
What’s the solution to this caveat? It’s not easy. There may not even by one. But I can offer a few suggestions.
Companies have to have the patience to allow someone to learn on the job. Allow for applications right out of school. Kids are generally a lot more open to the irksome responsibilities these jobs call for anyways. Night shifts are no problem. Recent college years have made them night owls by nature. Then rather than subtly pushing them out in a few years, provide a path out internally in the same amount of time. Let them see a progression towards something they want to do.
Ultimately companies are going to have to realize that you can’t be as picky with technical operations personnel as you are portfolio managers. Most guys are better than a vacancy. Even the bad ones can rival a currently overworked good one.
Unfortunately the signs point towards the status quo.
Recruiters, until that changes, be forever on the lookout from the crow’s nest of your inbox for one of the rare resumes previously described. Because until something changes you don’t hunt the white whale. It finds you.
