[ale] BOA

[fletch at phydeaux.org]

> I got an email from a recruiter at Bank Of America last week for a
> perl/c++ position.
> It seems like they are always hiring. I wonder if they burn through
> developers fast. Does anyone have experience working there.

That's most likely the group (Corporate Investments, Quantitative Finance)
I've been part of for just over 5 years[1] and I can count on one hand[2]
the number of people who've left the group and I believe only one of those
was a developer.  It may seem like we're always hiring but there's a
pretty demanding (or maybe 'formidable') set of expectations and abilities
we're looking for and they just haven't found the right person for the
slot yet (I'm not a deciderer though; I just give input and go all
merciless-Simon-Cowell-y on candidates' code submissions).


We're a small group (~25 people here in ATL) that's pretty independent
from the rest of the bank's IT infrastructure.  We've got our own clusters
of hardware (RHEL on IBM blades directly managed by sysadmins in our
group; I want to say in the neighborhood of ~10k cores across 6 logical
environments) running in-house C++ modeling programs glued together and/or
supplemented with Perl.  We often need very quick turnaround[3] so it's
not what one might expect of a "big corporate IT environment" in terms of
either schedules or layers of bureaucracy  (to say nothing of the strange
looks we get during the summer when we're all in shorts and tevas . . .).


So hopefully that helps.  And if not my employer will probably disavow all
knowledge of me and this email will self destruct in 5 seconds.


[1] And I have the paperweight to prove it

[2] And not using binary, mind you, so that's actually saying something :)

[3] More often recently given the
interesting-in-the-apocryphal-Chinese-curse-sense
    market conditions as one might imagine.

-- 
Fletch                | "If you find my answers frightening,       __`'/|
fletch at phydeaux.org|  Vincent, you should cease askin'          \ o.O'
                      |  scary questions." -- Jules                =(___)=
                      |                                               U