If banks keep cutting employees why do they still have so many staff?
While I realize this article is focusing on the more traditional &quot;bankers jobs&quot;, every time I read an article about jobs at banks, I think of things I&#x27;ve been told by a few close friends who worked in the industry (back when my area had a few banks who&#x27;s headquarters were local).<p>I am good friends with a couple of folks who worked in bank IT.  Both have told me similar stories despite working for different companies and not knowing each-other, so I&#x27;m reasonably convinced of their accuracy.  Though it might be something limited to these local banks (who were not huge players by any stretch), I get the impression it&#x27;s a common thing.  Both worked in IT, one in development and one in &quot;everything except development and mainframe[0]&quot;.  The non-dev guy told me that about every 6 months, the bank would axe an <i>entire department</i> -- and not just some oddball, unimportant department -- in one case it was a large group of people responsible for administration around loans and mortgages.  This department would <i>cease to exist</i> despite being once considered a necessity (and arguably still a necessity).  Three months later, they&#x27;d hire in a bunch of folks and create a department that was effectively doing what the axed department was doing (sometimes under the same name and staffed with many of the same people).<p>Non-core departments like HR and IT would be ebb and flow in radical ways -- my developer friend was let go when they just decided they were going to pay a company in India to build all of their apps and abandoned the local Java developers who were hired on to reduce their dependency on the mainframe, which never happened.<p>The environment they described sounds like a caricature of &quot;Office Space&quot;.  There was one case where a guy worked a pay-period too long and discovered he was supposed to have been let go only when his direct deposit didn&#x27;t appear in his bank account and one case where they had to sue a former employee because he was notified 5 years ago that his position was cut, he&#x27;d stopped coming into work, yet they continued to pay him and he continued to cash the checks.<p>They&#x27;ve both been out of &quot;Bank IT&quot; for a long time, now, but I&#x27;m fairly certain these issues persisted at least until 2010.  I recall one of the banks, when they started offering &quot;Online Banking&quot;, required you to use your social security number as your logon ID and limited passwords to case-insensitive, letters only, with a 10 character maximum.  It just had the smell of being a clear-text password stored in a varchar(10) field on a database without case sensitivity turned on.  And companies like American Express were (are?) doing things almost as badly.<p>Because of all of this, I have a feeling the article has some things wrong.  My sense is that the banks these guys worked for never really had a net job loss, they just operated in a revolving-door fashion -- axing departments while increasing headcount in others, and then repeating every few months with the departments names&#x27; being pulled out of a hat.  I don&#x27;t doubt that large sums of money are thrown into automation, particularly around algorithmic trading, because it directly makes the bank money (but I doubt that&#x27;s happening at any of the smaller banks like the ones that my friends worked for).<p>From what I understand, the same people that were let go from IT in the last round of layoffs are the only ones they can get to apply for the new jobs[1].  My buddy in IT -- who saw his department go from 10 employees to ... him and his boss ... ended up being re-staffed a few months later with five folks who had just been let go from a local competing bank and worked in IT for his boss at some point in the past... it was a revolving door with the same people going in and out of it.<p>[0] And it was quite literally <i>everything</i>.  This was early 2000 so that included the handful of traditional racked servers, routers, and the small number of endpoint-desktops connected via 16Mb Token-ring and given mostly to executives for them to use the screen-savers, Lotus 1-2-3 and terminal program to access the mainframe.  He was supposed to be responsible only for the servers&#x2F;network, but often found himself stuck working on the help desk and doing end-user support due to staffing constraints.<p>[1] Prior to meeting these two fine gentlemen, I applied for a job that I eventually turned down because I was so disappointed with the quality of individuals that interviewed me.  The woman I talked to couldn&#x27;t hide her disappointment, but there was something off that I later came to believe could be summed up by the phrase &quot;yeah, not surprised&quot;.