Nahin Imtiaz

October 02, 2019

Possibilities for a Computer Scientist in the Finance Industry:

A Story of a Business Graduate with a Minor in Computer Science

            “… those computer science courses ended up helping more than the business courses …”, said Mr. Samio Parvez, a Volatility Trading Production Support person at Barclays PLC, someone I’ve known for a long time. I had the opportunity to interview him at his office to get some insights into his job and I was amazed to see rows and rows of desks filled with hundreds of computers with trading software showing on displays. Although the interview was taken after office hours, I was lucky enough to get an overview of what Mr. Parvez’s work is like when a person came up with technical issues and he and his colleague had to sort out the problem.

Mr.Parvez got his bachelor’s degree in Business Management with a minor in Computer Science from Stony Brook University in 2004. When asked how a business degree goes with a minor in Computer Science, he explained that the business degree helped him to learn new business concepts in finance while the core computer science courses helped him  to learn new programming languages and the software that the business is using and to understand what the developers are doing and instruct them or help them get their helping resolving some of the more technical issues. While job demand was part of Mr.Parvez’s motivation, he also expressed his interests in the business mined side of engineering. Indeed, he’s getting the taste of both worlds.

Mr. Parvez’s experience in the library database system while he was in High School landed him his first internship opportunity in Computer Associates Technologies at his second year of college. There he maintained the database that the sales accounting department was using in Computer Associates. After that, in his third year, he did a study program at Barclays in London where his role was to create some visual scripts and a database in Microsoft Access application for a small team working on projects to manage their day to day activities. The other internship he had was with a DBA team of Citibank. There his responsibilities were to write scripts in PL/SQL and some shell scripts.

“These three internships were instrumental in getting his first role”, said Mr.Parvez, “more than my grades, my experience in the studying part, of course, you needed the core knowledge, but you know what really gives you that edge in the interview table is really your experience.” Mr. Parvez joined JP Morgan in 2004 as a Product Support person, where he had to handle issues that the desk or the business unit raises which could be anything from troubleshooting to writing a different script, issues that are reported after any changes that go into the environment. Mr. Pervez’s career went on switching to different other companies including BNP Paribas, Citibank, UBS, Morgan Stanley. His role was mainly production support and some product development. While he regrets switching to multiple companies too soon, he also mentioned that they were some of his good decisions that he made. They exposed him to different types of business and he believes, different experience raises the level of expertise.

Since 2018, Mr.Parvez is working at Barclays Plc from where he did his second internship. His role there is production support for a trading desk that trades a lot of equity derivatives. His typical workday as he mentioned, includes fixing issues or bugs reported by desks, communicating with developers while also working on other projects at hand that might include implementing a monitoring system, integrating a new script into the environment or contemplating what type of impact a new change might have on the production platform.

Mr. Parvez spends 2-3 hours each day doing emails to communicate and explain problems. Once a week, he writes documents in the format of confluence pages that are geared for knowledge sharing. Since his job is so integrated into the whole banking system, any change that might affect other systems may as well get into the trade flow. So, they always collaborate and have meetings for two hours each day. Although it’s not often, they give presentations when a new application is on-boarded or to explain a training desk how a new functionality works. (Mr.Parvez doesn’t affiliate with any organizations.) Although the working hour is usually 8-9 hours, sometimes they have to spend an extra two hours on on-call support.

To succeed in a technology field that is always evolving, he emphasized that knowledge to navigate business tools like well-crafted email, ways to present things, communication and writing is as important as knowing different technology and programming language. He also advised,“… try to figure out where you would want to be. Are you more of a developer or are you a production support person or are you a  business analyst person? So, there are various types of roles in the technology world. Do you like to work in the banking sector or do you like to work for a technology company? What is that that will make you wanna, like nurture your drive, make the workplace more fulfilling.”

As Mr. Parvez advised, picking up an internship before graduation should be the next step for me to take as it will give a real-life job experience and would make it easier to decide where I want myself to be. I would also consider taking some business courses or even possibly minoring in Business Management just to open up the possibilities a finance industry has to offer.

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