// he had written a mail saying there’s no such thing as a good job and i should concentrate on work and crack a PPO
yeah thanx for the fundaes… similar to what a lot of other people have been telling me of late… i for one have taken the best decision a manager can ever take – postpone the decision, for which one thing necessary is a PPO. i’m not doing anything silly or extraordinary. just trying to do my best at whatever work is being given to me. and have managed a really good mid-term review and should mostly geta PPO.
if i were chopra/gambhir, i won’t mind fielding at short leg as long as i’m opening the batting (and not batting at 11 and not even getting to bowl). what i mean is i don’t mind doing all the shitty work as long as the core work is good. but as i see it, the work that my manager does also isn’t very interesting.
we are in the swaps business. a client calls up asking for an interest rate swap. we price it up and quote a price and try sell a swap to him. the swap is later handed on to the traders on the floor.
however, the organization structure of JPM seems to be creating slysha problem. what i would ideally like to do is to design the swaps and indulge in “new product development”. however, the NPD here is done only by the hybrids trading team and they don’t hire directly – you have to excel in marketing for a few years before they take you. and even if i were to get there through this route, trading is way too hectic for someone like me… i can’t hold my concentration for more than 2 hours…
this leaves me with the option of marketing… i don’t particularly mind it as long as i am selling ‘good products’. the marketing division is put into country-wide teams and due to my language skills (rather the lack of them), i’m in the UK team. unfortunately JPM isn’t a very big player in the UK arena and hence we get only shitty deals to work on. extremely boring and stuff.
i don’t even mind doing what JPM calls a ‘sales job’, which is kinda entrepreneural and involves going out into the field and getting new clients. only problem is i’m not very comfortable in the environment here and have no contacts in the commercial banks in the UK (who are our potential clients). i would be able to do well in this kind of a role only in India – which is not covered out of London but out of Hong Kong and Singapore. and since i’ve interned in London, i won’t be able to get a job in there.
to put it in ‘your language’, the job that i’m doing is that the customer calls up and specifies requirements… there’s no need for us to translate that into design document… they’re so commonplace that it’s purely mechanical… yeah we do the coding and a lot of maintenance (we have to hand it over to a ‘middle office’ to book the deals and they’re filled with a bunch of jokers who invariably screw up – so testing also involved). (actually i used to quite like debugging – though it was painful. testing and maintenance is what i loath abt. software engg..).
i’m really confused about my career options right now… i’m kinda split between fin and ops (which is the only reason i’m thinking of consults)… i don’t even mind doing marketing/sales as long as i’m selling ‘intelligent products’ (fin products or software) and i’m selling to businesses/corporates and not to junta AND i must have a good understanding of the environment…
and yeah, one more thing to consider is that the i-banking industry seems to be headed for a downturn… signs are already in (i managed to get this out of my manager’s mouth last week)… and JPM’s arbit recruitment policy, etc. mean that it would be downsizing massively in case of a downturn…
in summary i don’t mind doing a lot of arbit stuff if i’m also doing some good work along with it… and i don’t want to put my boat into choppy waters…
lot of food for thought i guess…