Author: SK

every extra minute more i spend here in office, the more frustrated i become. as i had mentioned earlier, the IT systems here are pretty poor. hardly world class. and if this indeed is world class, then i’m proud (??!!) to say that many of our PSUs are also world class.

the last couple of days in office have been spent trying to check the work of a bunch of jokers called “middle office”. those guys don’t even consider it a shame for an intern to check on their work and to send them corrections!! and to imagine the better performers in there actually get promoted to normal investment banking!! ah, the high standards JPM has set!!

i was priding myself the other day for not having gotten depressed for the past 3 months (after a couple of months of unwarranted paranoia about grades and career, which i’m now out of). but of late, following the comments of a few friends, i feel i’m prone to depression in the next few days.

basically it goes like this:
i hate my job. it is extremely mundane. at least if a small portion of it was non-routine work it would’ve made my days. however, that is not the case to be. i mean, it is a really boring job. and i’m not helped by the systems (i’m repeating myself) or the lack of it at JPM. well, i’m really pissed and it’s very very unlikely i’m going to come back if offered.

however, no one other than my parents seem to believe that my job sucks. most people are like “every job is like that. there is no such thing as an interesting job. come and see our jobs, yours will actually be rocknig. and remember that you’re getting paid a really huge amount”, etc. now, that gives me the impression that since mine is the most interesting job (according to all these people) and i don’t find it interesting, i won’t find any job interesting. which means that i’m doomed to mundane jobs for the rest of my life. which means that after the one year of student life i have left in me (assuming i don’t do a PhD), i’m basically kinda screwed for life. i won’t fit into any organization – i’m too rebellious for that. blah blah…

back to other stuff now… my mid-term review suggested i’ll get a PPO. which would be damn useful for my finals. now teh way i’m going, it’s unlikely i’ll crack it… as in i’ve been openly protestnig against the kind of stuff being given to me… trying to drill management gyaan into my associates’ heads… my manager tried to place me with a couple of other desks which have more ‘interesting’ jobs… but they didn’t seem too enthusiastic to recruit…

no idea as to what will come out of this… hoping for the best…

// he had written a mail saying there’s no such thing as a good job and i should concentrate on work and crack a PPO

yeah thanx for the fundaes… similar to what a lot of other people have been telling me of late… i for one have taken the best decision a manager can ever take – postpone the decision, for which one thing necessary is a PPO. i’m not doing anything silly or extraordinary. just trying to do my best at whatever work is being given to me. and have managed a really good mid-term review and should mostly geta PPO.

if i were chopra/gambhir, i won’t mind fielding at short leg as long as i’m opening the batting (and not batting at 11 and not even getting to bowl). what i mean is i don’t mind doing all the shitty work as long as the core work is good. but as i see it, the work that my manager does also isn’t very interesting.

we are in the swaps business. a client calls up asking for an interest rate swap. we price it up and quote a price and try sell a swap to him. the swap is later handed on to the traders on the floor.

however, the organization structure of JPM seems to be creating slysha problem. what i would ideally like to do is to design the swaps and indulge in “new product development”. however, the NPD here is done only by the hybrids trading team and they don’t hire directly – you have to excel in marketing for a few years before they take you. and even if i were to get there through this route, trading is way too hectic for someone like me… i can’t hold my concentration for more than 2 hours…

this leaves me with the option of marketing… i don’t particularly mind it as long as i am selling ‘good products’. the marketing division is put into country-wide teams and due to my language skills (rather the lack of them), i’m in the UK team. unfortunately JPM isn’t a very big player in the UK arena and hence we get only shitty deals to work on. extremely boring and stuff.

i don’t even mind doing what JPM calls a ‘sales job’, which is kinda entrepreneural and involves going out into the field and getting new clients. only problem is i’m not very comfortable in the environment here and have no contacts in the commercial banks in the UK (who are our potential clients). i would be able to do well in this kind of a role only in India – which is not covered out of London but out of Hong Kong and Singapore. and since i’ve interned in London, i won’t be able to get a job in there.

to put it in ‘your language’, the job that i’m doing is that the customer calls up and specifies requirements… there’s no need for us to translate that into design document… they’re so commonplace that it’s purely mechanical… yeah we do the coding and a lot of maintenance (we have to hand it over to a ‘middle office’ to book the deals and they’re filled with a bunch of jokers who invariably screw up – so testing also involved). (actually i used to quite like debugging – though it was painful. testing and maintenance is what i loath abt. software engg..).

i’m really confused about my career options right now… i’m kinda split between fin and ops (which is the only reason i’m thinking of consults)… i don’t even mind doing marketing/sales as long as i’m selling ‘intelligent products’ (fin products or software) and i’m selling to businesses/corporates and not to junta AND i must have a good understanding of the environment…

and yeah, one more thing to consider is that the i-banking industry seems to be headed for a downturn… signs are already in (i managed to get this out of my manager’s mouth last week)… and JPM’s arbit recruitment policy, etc. mean that it would be downsizing massively in case of a downturn…

in summary i don’t mind doing a lot of arbit stuff if i’m also doing some good work along with it… and i don’t want to put my boat into choppy waters…

lot of food for thought i guess…

work at office gets woreshter and woreshter. however, i’m not allowed to tell this to anyone as all my dear friends have made a decision on my behalf that JPM is THE place for me to work and i’d be committing a grave mistake if i don’t convert PPO and sign out. of course, i have gotten a really good mid-term review, but after that either i’ve been getting no work or woreshtesht work. and if i were to let anyone know that i hate the stuff i’m doing, i won’t get PPO and all my friends’ dreams will be shattered.

on the other hand, work is getting so woresht that it’s difficult for me to keep my mouth shut and carry on this shit i’m doing (or not doing – i don’t get too much work these days, you know – business is bad). and the woreshter part is that the guy who sits next to me who’s been here for 6 years does the same kind of work as me! so it’s not as if they’re loading the intern with all woresht work and keeping the pseud work to themselves. in fact, they’ve been extremely kind that i’m directly getting involved in whatever work they’re doing…

seriously dunno what i’m going to be upto…

and people, if i screw up (which seems likely as of now), i’m really sorry in advance… but it’s getting increasingly tough to carry on this way….

today i was asked to do something i had done before again (and three times over) because the software package we use for this sucks. i asked if there are any attempts to repair the software. i was told there are none – because it isn’t used by enuff people.

i have a good feeling i can make shitloads of money if i could open a software company (based in B’lore/Chennai/Hyd) and convince JPM to allow me to make all their software packages – including maintenance.

somehow top management here seems to be extremely stupid and seems to totally lack vision. they’re still sitting on the fact that once upon a time in England, JPM was voted as the best i-bank for derivatives. i won’t be surprised if JPM closes down in another 10 years…

went to the last performance of the season of the London Philharmonic Orchestra yesterday… having paid 12 pounds and an opportunity to watch the champion’s league finals live on TV… for someone like me with a grounding in indian classical, the concert was a bit of a letdown…

the pieces they chose were way too jerky… instruments suddenly started playing and stopped playing… too much changed in too little time… i expected it to be a lot smoother and more ‘peaceful’ (hope you get what i’m saying)… unfortunately it wasn’t…

of course it was great coordination on the part of over 50 musicians to come together and go through the process of playing some of maybe western classical music’s not-among-the-best pieces… but the fact that it was so well coordinated and so well practised left some kind of emptiness… basically due to the size of the troupe, the spontaneity that is so evident in indian music (where not more than 5-6 people take the stage at a time) was lacking…

lots more to say but not able to articulate and write it down… more on this later…

today a couple of my friends here in JPM were told that despite their excellent performance through the course of the internship, they won’t be hired because the desk doesn’t know if it’ll require an extra person in April next year (markets are kinda volatile nowadays – investment banking seems to be at the beginning of a downturn). another intern (tommy) has been told that he can’t be hired after ‘only a 10 week’ internship but since his performance has been excellent, he will be offered another internship (for a ‘full 6 months’) after which he might be hired!

JPM also refuses to recruit during final placements (when they’ll know exactly how many people they need and where) because they have a policy not to recruit MBAs without an internship (however, they recruit BSc’s from arbit british colleges without any internships – and if we’re offered a job it will be at the same position as these arbit firangs!!!).

don’t think JPM deserves to be given a slot on day zero…

a while ago, a few old classmates of mine were playing a guessing game and trying to guess how much dowry i would be getting when i get married. well, being a brahmin, i’m not entitled to any dowry… that aside, i started getting a few thoughts on how dowry might have come about…

let us assume that women don’t work at all, so they don’t bring in any money by themselves (in certain areas of India, while ‘fixed deposit’ refers to a non-working wife bringing in a huge amount of dowry, ‘recurring deposit’ refers to a working wife with a much smaller dowry; more about that sometime else). now the debate is whether she belongs to her father or to her husband (let’s assume she marries exactly once) or both.

if she belongs solely to her father, dowry is justified as it is a lumpsum given by her father so that her husband can take good care of her. if she belongs to her husband, then ‘bride fees’ is justified. the husband pays his father in law at the time of marriage for having taken such good care of his wife. in case she belongs to both, however, it is the father taking care of her for the first part of her life and her husband for the second part.

marriage age was fixed long ago as half of average life expectancy. however, life expectancy has moved but marriage age hasn’t so the woman ends up spending more time with her husband. if people still believes that the woman is split exactly half-half between her father and her husband, her father should pay a small sum of money to her husband to take care of her for the first few years of her marriage when she actually belongs to the father! in this regard, the younger a woman gets married, more the dowry. the more a woman is expected to live, more the dowry!

In the Punjab, i heard it’s commonplace for a man (typically NRI) to get married, take the dowry and then quickly desert his wife, get married again, take dowry again, etc… i was wondering why this doesn’t happen in Gultland (according to me the heartland of dowry in India).

then a friend told me that in Gultland dowry is mostly in kind (land, gold, etc) and they’re all in the bride’s name. so if her husband ditches her, he won’t have any of the dowry money, so he won’t ditch her arbitly! gults are smarter than i thought they are (good performance in entrance exams (which gults are extremely adept at) doesn’t necessarily mean one is smart).

anyways, conclusion is that a large part of indian society believes that a girl belongs to her father, so he has to pay a large amount to her husband at the time of marriage so that he takes good care of her for the rest of her life.

2 weeks in office without much work has made me way too lazy. i’m now even too lazy to write on one of the many oh-so-interesting-to-write-about topics i came up with last week. too lazy to do anything.

first couple of days of this joblessness, i hoped that someone would give me some work so as to kill boredom. but the kind of work that was given enhanced boredom rather than killing it. right now, i’ve become sooo lazy that i would hate it even if someone would now give me the most interesting piece of work to do. all i want to do is to sit around… be vela… somehow get through the next 2.5 weeks… work can happen after that…

i just had another look at the topics i had listed out… looks like all of them require considerable thought – which i’m not prepared to do at the moment. right now, i’m comfortable sitting at my desk, staring at the monitor, looking as if i’m doing some great work and not waiting for people to give me work… and i’m being paid equivalent to about 8000 rupees a day for doing this….

yeah, coming to better things, after a month and a half of i-banking i don’t seem to be the hardcore capitalist i used to be when i came here (‘capitalist’ is an oft-misused word, so i may not have interpreted it correctly). of course i still believe in free markets, and i think they rock big time, but i don’t believe in the idea of doing something just because you can make money out of it – which i think forms the base of capitalism.

i believe that the investment banks are making an obscene lot of money and paying people like me a lot of money for hardly any work only because of the skewed demand-supply equation. probably if there were a hundred more new investment banks which could enter the market and slash prices, even i-bankers would start earning normal amounts. unfortunately the barriers to entry seem to be too high… (i’m actually using some arbit ‘frameworks’, wow!). maybe it’ll be insightful to do a porter’s analysis of this industry… i’ll probably do it on some day when i am actually willing to think. when i do, i promise you that i’ll write about it… no enthu to type more now…

yet another jobless day in office… after the mid-term review, they simbly have been refusing to give me work… wonder what they’re upto… if they’re trying to see how proactive i am, i’m afraid i’m not very…

who cares anyway… trying to enjoy the rest of my stay here in London… at the end of it if they make me an offer, it’s a bonus.

weekend was kinda unusual… didn’t go out of london… most people seem to have lost the enthu now…

saturday was anusmaran… here in london, we had three times as many alumni as interns… some takeaways… in 1996-97 100 people registered for int-fin. this year the course wasn’t floated due to lack of students… people used to stay 2 to a room in the first year… thank goodness we weren’t subjected to such horrors… then there was this funda of water parties where there would be music and all people would do was to throw buckets of water on each other…

then, most people who attended had switched jobs at least once, sometimes into a totally different sector and totally different job profile. actually provides hope for me just in case i make a wrong choice on that set of fateful days next march when i have to choose a career and get a good job in my chosen path…

one thing i noticed was that even though the event was scheduled to start at 12, i was among the first to arrive at 12:30. most people trickled in by two… a few started guzzling the cobra and kingfisher which were on sale at the venue for ?5 per pint… and one guy from the batch of ’04 was already sloshed when he walked in…

event ended as people dropped in their contributions towards the lunch (?16.50 per head, no subsidy for interns) and collecting (albeit broken) momentos (made, incidentally, by olympic sports, bangalore and which arrived in london only on the night before the meet).

nothing else interesting happened in London over the weekend… no masala whatsoever for Twisted Shout… went to woodlands yesterday evening and ordered a ‘mysore masala dosa’. maaajor letdown… they make better dosas than this in delhi!

and gandhi and i had this discussion yesterday as to how upon return to india we might end up overspending as we would convert all expenses back to pounds!!

more later… have to attend some arbit meeting now… and of course , i’m as vela as ever in office…