Author: SK

i believe i made a mistake two years ago by interning in a research lab rather than in a proper coding job, which would have given me a better picture of whether i wanted to do comp. sci.

as my boss is pushing back my review day after day (he’s told me “tomorrow” at least 4 times), i think it’s mostly going to be a “no”. and it’s not going to be communicated to me since in that case i’m going to stop putting fight.

keeping in mind that the probability of getting offered is really small, and even if i’ll be offered i won’t be taking it up (balls to bullet point), i’ve decided to give up and at least enjoy the rest of my stay here in London, rather than breaking my head about something non-existent.

i just want to go up to my boss and tell him how much this place sucks. just waiting for my review. there’s a small chance that i may still make it to an offer, which i can use to beautify my resume. that’s the only thing that is preventing me from going up and giving some honest feedback.

and it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that this place sucks. in fact, it takes even lesser intelligence to figure it out than it takes to price a vanilla swap using one of JP Morgan’s packages. so it is obvious that everyone else thinks this sucks. or at least they used to think so until they got sucked into the system.

the average person to enter JPM is a doofoo who’d have mugged his way through one of these crappy colleges in England. once he enters, he realizes that he is really lucky to be in such a high-paying job (yeah i know you must be thinking i’m freakin’ mad to say i don’t want such a high-paying job) and that by hook or by crook he must stay on here. if he starts cribbing about the system, given the place’s tika kobbu he won’t survive longer. and armed with a qualification which can, at best, fetch a call center job in a place like India (not sure what kind of a job it can fetch here in England), he can’t afford that. so he quietly understands and does his shitty work without cribbing. by the time his job is secure enough, he is part of the sucky system.

guess this has been going on for a few decades now! and the bank having existed for more than a hundred years, and having grown too fat to stand on its feet (though a series of arbit M&As that is – wonder how people trust this with their M&A when the investment bank couldn’t handle its own merger properly) it is impossible for anyone to change the system enough. totally pissing off.

review is due… however, after having figured out that i’m not particularly interested in my current job, i’ve been set up for an interview with a desk which is supposed to do more interesting work. that MD just came and gave me shitloads of stuff to read…

stuff i’ll have to read anyways for my fin. derivatives course next term. very mathematical. very interesting stuff.

however, when you start hating a place, even the best work that is given to you would be boring. normally i would have jumped at the opportunity to read this kind of stuff. but now i find it boring. it’s something like if the pitch is bad, even a wicketkeeper can turn the ball square. alternately, if you don’t like the ambience in a restaurant, even the most tastiest (i purposely put in the double superlative) food tastes insipid…

my last week in office just begins… review would be out in just a couple of days… and as it stands now, i don’t think i’ll have to take the trouble of deciding whether to join JP Morgan or not… i mean… 9 weeks has been too long a period to somehow hide the fact from everyone else at work that i’m not exactly loving my job… and given the humongous amount of tika kobbu that these big companies have, the last thing they would want is to make an offer to someone knowing fully well it will be rejected…

no regrets… has been probably the 2 months of my life where the learning per minute has been maximum… on a lot of fronts… interest rate swaps… functioning of an investment bank… industry in general (my only other ‘industry exposure’ has been at a research lab)… about life in London…

i have got a lot of time to ask myself uncomfortable questions… haven’t gotten the answer to most of them though… hope to do so during the course of the year…

looks like i’m already talking as if today is the last day… four more days to go after today

next week at this time i’ll be cooling my heels at home… and eating decent grub for a change…

as i wrote yesterday, i was really pissed with the kind of work, etc yesterday evening. all i needed was a sounding board to vent my frustration on…

and i don’t know why i did it but i did end up trying to convince the guy next to me that he’s obscenely OVERPAID!!!

i’m really pissed with my job now. i know i have only 6 more days in office after today.

but still it’s really pissing off when day after day you’re kept frustrated with no work for most part and then loaded with some real bullshit work, which any duffer who doesn’t have empty space between his ears can do.

really frustrating… want to just take a few minutes’ break and relax… however (if i don’t want to go out in the cold) there’s simply no place in the office to do it… every place here is so damn noisy… i just went out and sat on a couch in front of the lifts (the only comfortable seats on the floor – IITM theoretical computer sciences lab had better chairs than the ones in office here) and bloody the lifts start making funny noises…

have half a feeling of wanting to beat up someone now… just waiting for my final review on monday during which i can tell my manager how bullshitty all this work i’m doing is… yeah the pay is good, but thatz just the silver lining…

when i came in to JP Morgan, a day after a gruelling 3rd term, i was full of enthu. took whatever shit was thrown in my direction and worked. and even though i didn’t consciously do it, i managed to do a good job of it and got a good mid-term review.

this review was followed by 2 weeks of joblessness and suddenly the enthu seems to have disappeared. don’t feel like learning anything now. even if i were to be given teh most interesting piece of work in teh world now, i won’t feel like doing it. the fact that i have only a little mroe than a week here is also weighing in on my head. just going through the motions now… final review on monday… wonder how it’ll go… i’m pretty sure it won’t be as great as the mid-term.

probably if only i had been given enough work during the 6th and 7th week (which was when i lost enthu) and given some more interesting work, the hunger would’ve been sustained and i’d be doing a much better job of whatever i’m doing now…

the last one week i’m arriving in office a quarter of an hour late… i do a job that would normally take ten minutes in an hour… i sit looking at the clock all day, waiting for the day to end… i loathe it when my associate call me (that means work, generally of the boring variety)…

waiting to finish of the remaining time of my stay in JPM and then chill out for a few (3) days at home and then back to the grind at IIMB… at least there i won’t have to wake up early daily!! (i’m already beginning to miss student life)

today during lunch i happened to hear this ronan keating song, “you say it best when you say nothing at all…”. a lot of people believe that it is one of THE most romantic songs ever and stuff like that… according to me, it is simbly the nicest way of telling someone to shut up… think about it…

along similar lines… it is common that when something uncommon happens you say that “it will rain today” (eg. “oh you came to office early today? it will deffinitely rain”). against this background you have the song, “koi ladki hai, jab woh hasti hai, baarish hoti hai, …” (there exists a girl, whenever she laughs it rains). lyricist to pagal hai!

then, surprisingly, you have the dessert chain corner house being successful in bangalore. this intrigues me as in kannada slang (at least the variety my parents speak), “corner house” refers to the loo! probably it has succeeded because there are enough people in bangalore who don’t speak this slang.

on similar lines, hutch has also done reasonably well in bangalore (airtel maybe the leader by a long way but hutch has succeeded in uprooting spice from second place) though “hUtch” (with the U pronounced as in bUll or fUll) means madness! hutch is even casually referred to as “hUtch” sometimes…

interesting…

i know it’s been a long time since i put a public entry (there’ve been lots of ‘friends only’ entries in between). anyway, i’m halfway into the ninth week of my internship. another 11 days here in London and i’m done. work has been getting increasingly frustrating and yesterday i gave a long lecture to my boss as to how JPM won’t succeed because its systems aren’t good. Today manager replied saying that even though the systems here suck big time, they’re the best across the industry!!

Whether or not to improve technology is an oft-repeated application of the prisoner’s dilemma. In the case of investment banking, however, it looks like all companies are simply taking things lying down (if what my manager said were true). Surprising indeed…

Anyway, today i started writing my ‘report’. i didn’t do any project as part of my internship but IIMB’s academic requirements require a ‘project report’. so i’m writing one based on one of the hundred deals i’ve worked on. good thing is it won’t be evaluated for grades.

feeling too lazy now, so i’ll stop here.