I work at the Deutsche Bank TechCenter

Hello! I am Alexander Beloturkin, I work as a Dev Manager at the Technical Center of Deutsche Bank, where I came more than 4 years ago. On the first day it was unusual. Compared to IT companies, where most of them come in jeans and T-shirts, it was very unusual to see people in strict shirts and talking on the phone in English. But over time, the atmosphere became familiar and friendly. I was interested, on the one hand, proximity to the end user, the ability and desire of this user to explain the essence of the problems that we solve together, and on the other hand - colleagues who are so sensitive to the quality of their work. And, running a little ahead, I will say: no, we do not write accounting for win98, we make the world's most efficient platform for trading currency derivatives and many more interesting things.

So, I work at Deutsche Bank, in the Russian Technology Center. What does it mean to work as an IT specialist in such a large investment bank? This means that all your relatives and friends will be sure that you know in advance what will happen to the ruble and which picture will be chosen for 2000 rubles (Vladivostok) banknotes. But for some reason you hide it and, most likely, by mercenary.

In fact, this question can be answered for a very long time: it is enough to imagine how many people and all sorts of business processes exist in a bank. For example, more than 80,000 people work at Deutsche Bank. There are about 40 countries whose population is smaller. Iceland, which conquered everyone at the World Cup, has a population of about 330,000. Considering only the able-bodied population, it can be assumed that among people who can play football, Deutsche Bank is commensurate with Iceland and in theory can assemble the national team of the World Cup. In theory…

It would be strange to think that an organization of this scale can do without serious IT support. Of course, in such a large bank there is an IT infrastructure and a lot of software created. Investment banks have long ceased to be organizations around economists and bankers. Now in the center of investment banks is IT. It is IT that becomes what determines the efficiency of business processes, determines whose application will be the first to go to the exchange, who will better calculate the risks of transactions or who will first and better provide investment solutions to their clients.
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So what does it mean to work in an investment bank? For me, it is primarily to work alongside great professionals. The concentration of smart people here is very high. Some time ago I was working with a team that deals with High Frequency Trading. They struggle for microseconds for trading algorithms on exchanges. Have you read the article “What every programmer should know about memory”? (Google and read). Here, I think, these guys can tell everyone what they need to know about memory and about all the other guts of modern systems, in 10 microseconds to react to price changes, make a complex calculation and send an application to the exchange.

On my project there is a quantum living in London. This is one of those people like that in the whole world - only a few, and I can communicate with him every day and often not for one hour. True, after talking with him you feel like a freshman. His knowledge of mathematical calculations of financial instruments and the entire internal kitchen is simply amazing.

Some say that there is a lot of legacy in the bank (junk)

Well, of course, there is Legacy code: Deutsche Bank in Russia is already 135 years old. The programming language "C" was invented in the early 70s. Obviously, the software in the bank was not written the last 5 years, as in a young startup, but much longer. But where advanced solutions and technologies are needed, inefficiencies are quickly eliminated. As a result, those legacy that are are well-written, well-proportioned applications, which are sometimes not inferior to modern solutions. Next to me sat a man who, by coincidence, was engaged in rewriting one legacy of the system, which was often easier to understand with the help of debugging than with the help of source codes. Here he received a noticeable pleasure from the opportunity to unearth something there, to understand the author’s original thought and improve it first logically, and then technically. As a result, we managed to save an indecent amount of support for the old solution, improve the behavior of the system and just be proud of the work done. But this job is not for everyone.

Knowledge of the subject area

I always say that you cannot write a good product if you do not know what you are doing and for whom. This, of course, makes you study some banking theories. Does everyone need this? No, there are projects that are of little relevance to business and more likely represent an infrastructure component. And there are projects where there is nothing to do without understanding the business. And here, as they say, the taste and color ... For example, I am very interested in the calculations of various derivatives, respectively, I can bring much more benefit in projects where this knowledge will be useful. What is definitely needed is knowledge of the English language, since often even correspondence within the team is in English, not to mention communicating with business users.

What tools are used?

In short, they are different. There are, of course, some strategic decisions (no one wants a heterogeneous IT infrastructure), but at the same time, it mainly depends on the project and its needs. If there is a reasoned understanding of why this or that software should be used, no one will force you to use something completely inappropriate. Plus, there are quite large projects where there is a need and expediency to use some expensive / large solutions, and, accordingly, it is possible to touch such systems and products. I, for example, have a project of 10,000 CPUs that constantly count something. Optimizing algorithms by a couple of percent saves a substantial amount on electricity from these CPUs.

In this regard, a new project in the bank does not differ from a startup, git, mongo, hadoop, - all that is needed, if justified. Not far from me, for example, colleagues use Scala and Actors. Often I overhear what they think about all this =).

Agile or not Agile?

Depends on the team. Someone chooses one, someone else. We are not process-oriented. If we want and can, we use one methodology, if not - another. In our project, the perverted Agile, we changed it the way we are comfortable with, and at the same time continue to divide. In general, this is of course an internal command question. Deutsche Bank periodically hires trainers to train scram masters, product managers and so on. For teams that attended such courses with the entire composition, the effect was, of course, noticeable even to their neighbors. We are well aware that it is necessary to write effective code (see about saving electricity or about 10 microseconds), but at the same time reliable and supported. We can be woken up at 4 am to understand the problem, and then very quickly you begin to understand the value of logs, diagnostic utilities, etc. Mistakes in this area can be very expensive. Therefore, we really invest in the supportability and reliability of systems and learn from every failure - to eliminate it and its like as a class.

Where to grow

Deutsche is honestly a good place for professional growth. Someone grows technically, someone as a leader, someone from IT goes into business. It is possible to move from one project to another. I would say that everything is very logical in terms of the fact that there is a need for everyone to like what they are doing, because no one needs disgruntled employees who, for no reason at all, file a letter of resignation. We have programs for senior students and graduates. They undergo a little training, and then get into a full-fledged team, where, if they wish, they can grow with great speed.
We open the blog of Deutsche Bank in Habré to tell you about us, our projects, our employees, our ideas and observations in IT, and, of course, just to talk with you about IT technologies.