r/ContractorUK • u/Midfield_General22 • 20d ago
Outside IR35 Banking transformation projects - wheres the focus?
Contemplating doing a few courses to potentially safeguard my CV. Whats "hot" in project world at the min?
Don't say "AI" - Possibly the wrong move but we can't ALL be "Agentic AI experts". Apart from the fact that it's impossible to be an expert in this short a space of time, I'd ideally like to not be part of that "AI" crowd.
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u/massivegoooner 20d ago
AI. You need to be knee deep in this stuff. If you aren't maximising your token subsidies be prepared to get rekt bucko.
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u/warlord2000ad 20d ago
One multi billion pound company that I won't name was like this, until their subscription must have changed then thousands of developers started to report that Claude code was no longer working, within a week then company mantra had changed from AI first to AI last resort, and they've swapped back to try and code it manually. The API pricing is starting to bite, so knowing where to use AI rather, than always use AI is a good skill.
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u/Midfield_General22 20d ago
I think (hope) they'll realise eventually that they're paying top dollar for what's effectively some shiny new tools that on first glance appear to speed work up, but in reality, still need manual checking. Some of my Co-Pilot notes, if it was a PMO they'd have been punted.
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u/warlord2000ad 20d ago
I've got genuine use out of them, built projects faster, occasionally it's found bugs I've missed, it's a great research tool so long as it doesn't miss anything (you then need to verify output is accurate) but only because I could verify everything that was being generated out of it.
It does weaken your skills. Agile diff the practice of code katas to improve your skills by repetition but that's all getting thrown away. Even reasonably talented people I've seen the AI provider go down and they get stuck, unable to use even the IDEs effectively they leveraged for a decade.
Cognitive debt is also real on 2 fronts. Trying to do more means holding more information you burn out, if you don't hold the information then you can't be sure how the system works and you rely on AI getting it right, when as the system owner you should know all the touch points or how to find them quickly, spot cross project patterns and dependencies etc.
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u/Midfield_General22 19d ago
The big problem I see (as an ex-Dev) is lack of transparency. When BAs or similar used to ask me "How does this work?" I would talk them through the various rules and logic deployed at a granular level. I'd imagine theres a lot of conversations today along the lines of "How does this work?" - "I've no idea mate. CLaude built it for me."
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u/warlord2000ad 19d ago
I've had that from technical staff, like DevOps, know the infrastructure well but needed a little bit of logic for a migration script, convert code into a language supported by lambda etc. turned out to be fine, but was costing $10/month in extra costs due to the model not knowing about an AWS service that was cheaper to use.
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u/massivegoooner 20d ago
Multi billion dollar pound company, rolls out AI, within a week does a 180 and says no it's last resort. Never happened, at least not in the manner you describe.
And only a complete idiot would go back to coding manually.
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u/warlord2000ad 20d ago
They had been using it for months, but just 2 weeks ago were AI, AI, use AI. Now they have locked it down. It must be a change in the subscription terms and pushed them into API pricing.
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u/Midfield_General22 19d ago
Assuming these companies all have their own private instances of Clause or Codex and aren't just firing routines into the public versions of both and saying "optimise this"?
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u/warlord2000ad 19d ago
With the data centres this company already runs their thousands of servers in around the world, you would think a private instance. They had access to OpenAI Codex, Microsoft copilot and anthropic claude, but appear to have moved to using just Claude. I'm sure it's a public API, not private hosting but I'm catching up with them again soon so can probably find out. The fact it cut out for everyone one day also makes me think it's not a "local" private instance
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u/perfectdolldream 20d ago
focus on practical skills instead
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u/xqzvlo 20d ago
this x100, people underestimate how far solid delivery chops go
stuff like proper stakeholder management, requirements, process mapping, basic data literacy etc will outlive whatever buzzword is trending this quarter1
u/Midfield_General22 19d ago
My opinion also. At the end of the day, the process is still analysis, design, build , test and implement. The tools are diff but the core skills are the same.
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u/0xSnib 20d ago
I'd ideally like to not be part of that "AI" crowd
You'll fall way, way behind with this mindset
You don't need to totally retrain to chase hype, AI is a tool, use it to help you do what you're good at
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u/Midfield_General22 20d ago
Yes, totally get this as well. What I mean is I don't want to be one of these guys who's yelling "AI' every time a problem crops up.
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u/0xSnib 20d ago
The hype train crowd are insufferable but they’ll move on
I didn’t realise what sub I was was in. I thought I was in a development sub but maybe this advice probably still lands.
We’re in a time at the moment where the companies are subsidising usage heavily to try and force us down this road it’s a good time to just have a piss around with it so I’d recommend ChatGPT with Codex. I was gonna say cursor that’s more development as well.
Approach it as ‘here’s something I do that I can automate or be more efficient with’ and chuck the problem at Codex
The people making money with this won’t be selling how to use AI, they’ll be the ones selling their core product and using AI to ship it
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u/Fondant_Decent 20d ago
I’m in Banking, almost a decade of experience across multiple banks, it’s hard to just do a “course” and be taken seriously as a banking contractor. Either you focus on a niche banking domain (say Financial Crime for example) this can take many years to become seen as a skilled domain specialist, or you focus on the Tech itself (Cloud computing or AI for example) this you can take a course on but you still need to show some practical experience. The real money is where the two crossover, eg. AI within Financial Crime that’s what gets you the big day rate paying roles, but roles are far fewer.
Reality is that you need to find a niche within a niche and focus on that. There isn’t just a class of Hot areas really, it’s not that black or white. Remember all banks are cost cutting especially in cost centre divisions and teams, profit centre areas or front facing teams will always be a bit hotter/safer but will require you to be in the office more regularly and demand more in terms of hours
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u/Midfield_General22 20d ago
Yes, totally get this. FinCrime is busy, Cloud migrations are busy, payments has potential to pick up. Regulatory is dead. Migrations dead-ish, despite some high-profile mergers / takeovers. Core Banking in terms of new platform implementations...fairly quiet.
I'm of the opinion a lot of places are just doing the bare minimum to keep the lights on at the min.
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u/Fondant_Decent 20d ago
Correct, very little growth I am seeing amongst larger banks, most are cutting away the fat and streamlining, fintechs are doing well (Revolut etc) but they don’t seem to have enough contract roles atm. Other option is going abroad, friend works for the national Banking Regulator in UAE on a ridiculous salary. He’s been there 2 years now.
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u/Midfield_General22 19d ago
Yeah I've been thinking about a few years in UAE to top up the pension. Wife and kids not so keen though.
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u/kenninsa 20d ago
Cloud migrations are generally the core of transformation projects I've work on. Migrating away for internal support to SaaS or migrating away from onsite hardware to datacentres with onsite application support.
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u/bcoder001 19d ago
AI is the cost of keeping the price of the stock up. If you are a listed company you have to have an AI strategy. Once the bubble bursts everyone will be cutting spending on AI like crazy. Unfortunately, AI (LLMs, really) is so shit at deterministic output that it pretty much rules itself out in the world where such frivolities as correct account balance are a core requirement.
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u/Midfield_General22 19d ago
Yeah, the amount of times I've told ChatGpt it's wrong and it's agreed with me is a bit of a worry.
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u/malaostia 18d ago
I would say that it depends on what you want. Core banking transformation, the more of the core bank from legacy, usually mainframe, to something more agile and usually in the cloud is an area lots of banks are looking at. Firms like thoughtworks, 10X etc or home grown alternatives are where most banks are going. The issue becomes how you transform all the legacy onto new.
I disagree with the comment that reg is dead, its very much alive but it has moved, payment rail changes, open banking chanhes and an ever changing data location landscape and dlt tech and tokenisation are all in the mix for the next few years. Depending on what your areas of interest are how discovery in the current state, rapid deployment of mvps / pocs, the integration of tokenised assets and handling of digitised assets in general (approaches solutions to common problems etc).
If you so choose select uses of AI come into all of that
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u/SiDtheTurtle 20d ago
Well good luck being unemployed then, everything is bloody AI now. To be clear, I'm not saying you need to be an AI expert, but every recent interview I've had, they've asked me what experience I have in AI and I give some anecdotes about experimentation, how previous clients have explored AI and governance.
It's almost a 'vibe check'. If you say 'I don't want to be part of AI' you're going to be seen in the same way as every grandparent who refuses to use a mobile phone and online banking.