Despite the impending doom and gloom of a city recession (or just a few months of uncertainty, depending on your point of view), the recruitment agents are out in force at the moment. Most people I've spoken to recently have had a ton of cold calls and there's a worrying trend. But before I dive into that, let me summarise what I think are the three types of city developers.

1. Those with a passion for business knowledge : This set of developers have a real passion for understanding the business area in which they are working and is particularly common within the investment banking industry. The people in this group (and I know a lot of them) genuinely want to learn more about credit derivatives, equity derivatives, FX, quantitative analysis, etc.
2. Those with a passion for IT as a craft : This is the set of developers with a genuine interest in technology, who would be happy to use new and cool technologies regardless of the business context. I know a lot of people in this group too, and typically they aren't that fussed whether they work in FX, equities, etc or even in investment banking.
3. The 9-5'ers : There are undoubtedly developers in the city that are in IT because it pays well and they aren't necessary interested in either of the above. This is fine, everybody has the right to earn a living doing what they want.

It's probably fairly obvious that I fall into category 2; my interests are in technology, software development and solving business problems with technology. Most of my investment banking work has been in the middle/back office, which means that I've not been exposed to the "shop window", where all of the real business stuff happens. By the time business information makes it's way down to middle/back office systems, it's all just flat files and messages. For all I know, the front office could be selling fruit and veg. Okay, I'm exaggerating. Systems in the middle/back office *do* deal with business concepts, so you have to understand them. For somebody like myself in category 2, I'm typically brought into a project because of my technical skills and my view is that the people around me already have the business domain knowledge. It's rare to find people with a passion for both the business *and* technology, but they do exist (Evolution did a good job hiring a number of them in the past).

With this in mind, let me paraphrase a couple of recent conversations I've had from agents cold-calling me.

• [Agent] Hi, I understand that you're an experienced Java developer/architect.
• [Me] Yes.
• [Agent] Fantastic, we have some excellent senior roles available at the moment. What's your [equity derivatives|credit derivatives|algo trading] knowledge like?
• [Me] (explain that I'm in category 2 with a strong technology focus).
• [Agent] Not too worry, we could pitch you in with a reduced rate/salary with a view to increasing that after 6 months. How does that sound?

I've worked in the city for the best part of 10 years and I don't understand this one-sided view that recruitment agents seem to have. If you don't know "the business" then you're effectively a second class citizen. The implication of all this, of course, is that business knowledge is deemed more important than technical knowledge. I find this attitude quite disturbing.

Many city organisations *do* value technical know-how. I've helped some of my customers hire developers (often to replace me when I roll-off the project) and even the permanent employees aren't always expected to have a deep understanding of the business domain. I've seen many permies hired from into investment banks from outside of the industry because of the technical skills they bring to the table, and I know of one large bank that is currently trying to explicitly hire people from outside of IB because they want to evolve the way that they think about technology.

What are your thoughts on this? Should I forget about learning how to build scalable systems, sell my tech books and study the financial markets instead? ;-)

Responses[8]

Posted by Simon Brown on 20 March 2008 10:24:00 GMT #