If you look at the serious pieces of infra inside the front offices for pricing and risk however, there are some smart people that have done some good software.
Quite often however those projects are degraded as stewardship of these projects is inconsistent, and long tenure is not always there, so you don't get continuity in terms of engineering talent.
Frequently this is due to the fact that IT is treated as a cost rather than an enabler of profit, and salary increases do not keep pace with the market worth of fulltime employees - leading to job hopping.
For the non-managerial part of the financial developer's career, it is often a better trade to be an independent contractor on a good daily rate with tax breaks, than take the chance upon fluctuating market conditions and bonuses.
As software developer bonuses are not tied to material outcomes like the front office but are generally more qualitatively judged, this leads to insecurity.
The developers that hang around for many years and end up being the stewards of these good systems that slowly rot, are quite often the ones that are incurious about contracting or moving, or have no better options.
We are routinely picking the top few percentile from the best colleges - the banks don't lack talent - but what they lack is management with good engineering discipline, and good projects sometimes turn bad.
For the professional developer who is actually skilled, this provides unbounded opportunities - it is often easier to make a really big impact with relatively little effort by pruning an overrun garden than rebuilding a very large amount of function points from scratch.
Finally, it is incorrect to say that version control systems are not used. Simply not the case.
It is rare these days in my experience - it creates an appropriate separation of concerns to have the management alignment distinct (that can be interpreted to be a Sarbannes Oxley requirement.)
There can be budgeting for specific desk profits in the relative bonus pools decided in IT, but bonus makes up a smaller percentage of developer total comp generally unless you are approaching management.
If you are desk dev and hack Excel and Access for the front office that can help your case in regards bonuses, but this isn't true software development of course.
I am speaking of my last 15 years in London working in derivatives/front office IT, and interviewing for many jobs in front office IT. It is very exceptional to find banks that will organise IT to report into the front office structure - this doesn't occur, and I almost never hear of such a thing when I see job specs.
It's not all of IT, but it's not unusual for quant dev type roles to report to the front-office (either singly or as part of a dual-reporting structure). The reporting doesn't have to be direct for dev bonuses to be tied to PnL either, what I've seen happen at some places is that a certain percentage of the desk bonus pool is assigned to the development team and the development team management than decide how to split that pool among the developers.
Go to efinancialcareers and search for "PnL bonus" if you want to see some examples of job specs mentioning it.
If you look at the serious pieces of infra inside the front offices for pricing and risk however, there are some smart people that have done some good software.
Quite often however those projects are degraded as stewardship of these projects is inconsistent, and long tenure is not always there, so you don't get continuity in terms of engineering talent.
Frequently this is due to the fact that IT is treated as a cost rather than an enabler of profit, and salary increases do not keep pace with the market worth of fulltime employees - leading to job hopping.
For the non-managerial part of the financial developer's career, it is often a better trade to be an independent contractor on a good daily rate with tax breaks, than take the chance upon fluctuating market conditions and bonuses.
As software developer bonuses are not tied to material outcomes like the front office but are generally more qualitatively judged, this leads to insecurity.
The developers that hang around for many years and end up being the stewards of these good systems that slowly rot, are quite often the ones that are incurious about contracting or moving, or have no better options.
We are routinely picking the top few percentile from the best colleges - the banks don't lack talent - but what they lack is management with good engineering discipline, and good projects sometimes turn bad.
For the professional developer who is actually skilled, this provides unbounded opportunities - it is often easier to make a really big impact with relatively little effort by pruning an overrun garden than rebuilding a very large amount of function points from scratch.
Finally, it is incorrect to say that version control systems are not used. Simply not the case.