So it's August, which is a good time to think about where I want to go after The Retail Bank. I accepted a role graded below my current one – it was that or be thrown in the internal clearing house – and while I have a couple of years on my current salary, they can impose a pay cut after that unless I've worked myself back into their good graces. The Retail Bank won't be allowed to remain in its current condition by either the EU, the Conservatives or the various government authorities who were told to shut up and let the deal go through. So there will be another re-organisation within, I'm betting, the year. The short odds are on a floatation of The Scottish Bit.
So I have some time to do this right. I can't leave it too long or the CV will start to degrade a little.
My first thought is that the roles I want are “hands-on”. At and above a certain level, which I'm at, in The Retail Bank and I suspect a lot of other companies, most of what you do is about making the organisation change or do something. You attend meetings, work the bureaucracy, fill in online forms for permissions to do this and that, persuade people to do things for you and most of all, try to get IT and Operations to do stuff for free – or as part of “BAU”. You make Powerpoint presentations and occasionally crunch a few numbers. You don't learn any transferable skills or anything interesting. To me, this isn't real work and it isn't interesting: why do I want to clutter up my head with the workings of an old and clunky system? Someone has to, but it isn't me.
And it gets worse. Because it's a bank, you're working with poorly-documented old systems that no-one understands and consequently everyone is afraid to touch. It takes a huge effort in IT and Operations just to keep the normal business going and of course they downsized several times so they don't have spare people to assign to projects. So any change that the commercial people want to make has to be prioritised, assessed, lobbied for and ultimately referred to the unspoken pecking order. (In The Retail Bank, that's Branches, Telephone Sales, Current Accounts, Credit Cards, Credit Risk, Audit, Operational Risk and Personal Loans – in that order.) So there are a whole bunch of roles which amount to little more than “internal lobbyist”. If you're lobbing for a function towards the bottom of the pecking order, you are on to a loser. Another way of describing this I've used to two agents today about the same job is “silo-runner”, because the organisation is divided into silos and they want you to run between them and dodge the shells. One agent burst out laughing at that description.
I don't want to be a silo-runner. I want to do stuff. At heart I'm an engineer: I want to be designing things or processes, creating, solving problems, using tools and learning stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'll punch the air when I've used one part of the bureaucracy to beat another part, but I wouldn't want to do that for a living. Read this and this to get a pretty good picture of me, then add some charm and a few more social skills.
It's not about the size of the organisation - though I keep thinking it is. It's about the role. Large organisations do tend to have a larger number of silo-runner roles described in the most preposterous language. I was sent one recently that asked for an “acclaimed specialist” in pricing. I will take the mickey out of that one later. Small organisations don't go in for the BS but do expect a lot for the money, and the really small ones are often set up by entrepreneurs who realise they have no technical understanding, need rescuing but want to resent you for it because they thought it was going to be an easy buck.
What I don't want to do is have my choices dictated by the bad times I've had at The Retail Bank. I'm pretty sure I don't want to be in large, broken down companies, but that's not all large companies (is it?). Am I sure I want to go on doing a lot of VBA and expanding to Visual Studio? I do programming when there isn't enough brain candy in the business side of a job, not because I really dig programming. I don't rush home to learn more cool tricks on my Mac. Yet if there ever was a computer you could spend a long time learning cool tricks on, it's a Mac: it's Unix, Objective-C, it's Ruby and others, and I should be editing my own videos by now. You see what I mean? I'm making decisions not based on what I want or am interested in, but on what stops me from going barmy. If I could find an interesting management job that wasn't lobbying, Powerpoint and silo-running, I'd be interested and maybe not want to program.
It's August, I have a job and I don't have to rush this.
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