The Ugly
(this is about climbing the ladder)
The Ugly. The guy that everyone either hates or adores. The overachiever on steroids. Dare I say an almost typical MIMUW student. This dude got into the finals of the Polish Olympiad in Informatics in his junior year of high school and decided that he didn’t need to go to school for another two years. Officials helped him graduate in just 14 months.
The Ugly enrolled in the Joint Computer Science and Mathematics program at MIMUW but after the first year figured out that he would rather work, so he moved to the pure Computer Science program and started working 3 days a week as a programmer at a small company in Warsaw. But then he got bored. He figured that he had to complete the degree quicker. He completed three semesters worth of credits during just one and got his Master’s degree at 21 (the diploma may have arrived later).
This is the third article in the short series called “The Good, the Mom and the Ugly” about the alumni of MIMUW - the #5 university in the world in theoretical computer science (source: csrankings.org, the world, 2011–2021, Theory). Here is the previous article: https://janlanecki.medium.com/the-mom-602765a317be.
He got several job offers after graduation including an internship at an investment bank — Barclays, but they wouldn’t count his two years of experience at the previous company towards a promotion. He decided to go with a hedge fund based in Japan instead that honored his experience. After a year or two he applied to another investment bank in London and with his experience from the hedge fund he skipped two entry-level positions and became Assistant Vice President.
The hours were long. He was solving hard and low level problems in legacy systems. One time while debugging an internal banking application he found a bug in Windows kernel which manifested itself in Java Virtual Machine. Another time, he worked along Ulrich Drepper, the core contributor of GNU C Library to improve the library. With large company’s resources he also had the possibility to influence other companies like JetBrains or Windows to implement certain new features.
After about 2 years, at 25, the Ugly got promoted to Executive Director. But in investment banks in London to actually manage people you need at least 10 years of experience. He had to wait. A few years ago he moved back to build an engineering team for the Polish office of the bank. During the first year the hardest thing for him was to switch from individual contributions to managing and dealing with stakeholders. Currently, after around 9 years at the company, he is still working his way up to become a Managing Director.
What’s the work like as a software engineer at an investment bank?
Projects are extremely long. They span 15–20 years. During this time they are rewritten 3 or 4 times and when the project is finished it does something entirely different than at the beginning. There is much less flexibility in terms of technology stack, devices used for development, using social media on company devices. Main focus is on evolving and integrating systems with other applications, often very old ones. This creates larger barriers to entry. The thing that is mostly up to date is UI. Even banking applications have to look good.
What does he think about moving abroad?
Main motivations for the Ugly were a stellar career, money and stability. This is why he chose to move to the UK and work for a large company. He says that people generally don’t settle there. Out of 16 people from his class who moved to the UK only he was still abroad at the 10 year mark. After moving back he thinks that software engineers in Poland are paid much more than elsewhere in relation to the standard of living tech salaries provide.
