Finance Internship Benefits when getting a full-time offer?

BigMike3541
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:14:33 +0000

@oldfort I think we just have a difference in perspective. there is no such thing as front office IT at a bank. I was on a volatility analytics team that supported a couple teams of traders and some quants as well. We were definitely back office, very back office. Maybe we weren’t the one’s updating the company’s website and fixing computers, but definitely still back office. You can think of them as front office if you want, but you won’t be treated (or paid) like it. I guarantee that the traders you work for will absolutely not think of you as front office.

Also, I had an offer from GS strats, and am super well aware of what they do. although, there is a lot of variation from team to team. Most of the one’s I met coded in straight c++ as well as goldmans proprietary language

As for salaries, most of my friends that are going to top software firms are making between 15-25K more a year in salary than starting analysts at banks.

If you are not a programmer you should not go into IT. The IT behind banking (and probably wealth management as well) is not very complicated. Afterall, all bankers do at the end of the day is use excel and make powerpoint presentations. Most bank do make addons and such to excel/powerpoint to make putting together presentations and models easier, but thats not really interesting from a technology standpoint. Supporting trading can be different, since there are definitely electronic trading systems that are as much (if not more) about the technology used to build them than the underlying trading ideas themselves (especially true in high frequency). These technical problems can get a lot more difficult though, and are about optimizing network connections, optimizing code (some places rewrite everything into assembly by hand for max speed), hacking into kernals/doing really intense stuff to get really small increases in speed. This is obviously only for hardcore techies.

Basically everyone I met in IT was a coder. there were a few product manager types, but they had a coding background as well. For my summer I spent time designing and coding a couple user interfaces for new apps (java) and some scripts to interact with the file system to organize very large amounts of market data (perl).