GUEST COMMENT: As a reasonably recent graduate, I have been forced to take my career in hand
Last week, I changed jobs for the first time since my graduation.
I would like to make it clear that I didn't necessarily want to switch jobs, but that I was left with no choice. It simply seemed that my previous employer was acting in neither my, nor its, best interest.
I started at my previous employer as a graduate. It had a reputation for being one of those banks that retains its graduate hires for longer than the rest. I wasn't totally happy there, but it was an average place to work and I'm not going to complain.
I am a technologist and I found myself working in a small technology team as a developer. I talked to users to gather their requirements in much the same way as a business analyst and provided support where necessary. It was a good mix.
And then suddenly, organisational change hit.
The top executives decided it would be a good idea to group technical teams into specific functional groups, instead of aligning them to business lines like most banks do. From my perspective this was a terrible move. It meant I would be familiar with only one functional component of the bank. I would not be able to change jobs and would be tied to bank-specific architecture. As far as I am aware, there is one other bank that does this and it has not proven a success.
Under this new model, developers wouldn't interact with business users directly. They would communicate via an extra layer. People didn't like this. Some people really liked talking to the business and they moved on. There was chaos as people left.
Worse, the ultimate goal was to outsource all in-house development. This seemed crazy. It was suggested that I might like to become a project manager. But I felt that I didn't have sufficient technical understanding for that.
Frankly the entire move seemed bizarre and I was left with no option but to find somewhere else to work. It was a great shame and I had to let some people down. But this is my career, I have to plan it and make some difficult decisions. Hopefully I have made the right one.
