Bank on me

A lot of people get their interest from the bank, or even salary from a bank, but I get my salary paid by a bank. I have maintained a very low profile for the last couple of months, partly due to getting flustered by the new working environment. Ever since I got into the new company, I have had a tough time explaining to people that it really is a bank and Im not making names up :P Atleast for the football freaks, I can mention the title sponsors of EPL and that settles the matter. Not quite. The immediate question: "Do you get free tickets to EPL". As if I care a damn abt EPL. Yeah yeah, being the world cup time, I need to bring in football somewhere. And my fav? Brazil, Spain, Italy, Germany in that order.

Anywayz, coming to the bank, I realised that banks in general are one of the lousiest working environments u can find. My work is making me yawn in boredom rather than in lack of sleep, like a few months bak. Banks are highly structured in terms of products, heavily dissected in terms of resources, largely unstructured in terms of processes and just chaotic in terms of technology. If you find 101 systems to manage 100 products where most of those products interact with each other, 50 systems are so out of date that vendors dont support them, 75 systems give you the same data in different formats and suddenly one day u realise 25 systems are redundant, and one system is erroneous and u dont know which system that is, now u r talkin banking language!

Added to this, all the fuss on top of it in the name of security and compliance, and a nosey manager who doesnt seem to know anything but to say "yes" when talkin to the top management, while being hellbent on finding faults in u. And these "faults" range from spending too much time on the company's internal technical forum (?) to doing stuff in my desk other than my job scope (like helping my colleagues) (??) to not having written proof of having gone through the company's online knowledge bases (???) to not knowing english cos I wrote "I will intimate you once its done" to a business user and he took "intimate" to mean "imitate" :P

The only consolation is the people there. They usually have the best in the business, but whts the point recruiting the best to do the worst? In no other industry do u find 3 ex-architects and 2 ex-project managers working as developers in the same team :P Why? The key selling point (and maybe the only one) is the domain. Financial Services, Banking and Insurance (FSBI sector in short) is the only place where the money really is! So, everyone does suckle up to get the domain knowledge in this area. So did I. But I have an unique perspective, having been in all three of those areas, and I do find that Banks are the most complicated (need not necessarily be the most complex) place to be in. In most industries, hardly anyone cares about the "bigger picture", while in banks, nobody really knows the entire stuff.

Ofcourse, I expected it to be as messy when I joined, and being the eternal optimist I look at it not as a problem, but as an opportunity. I realised that in the formative years of your career, it is of utmost importance for you to take on the challenges, instead of finding faults and escape routes.

RAQ: Knowledge without Application is useless, Application without Acknowledgement is worthless, Acknowledgement without Appreciation is pointless.

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