About Me and Why:
I created this post in aim to summarize my 5 years (2015–2020) of both soft and hard application support skills in the financial industry. I have worked at places in tier one investment bank, proprietary trading industry, and billion dollar hedge fund.
Job Prospects:
The Application support engineer position uses many different names like technical support, business response, operations support, trading support, automation engineer, system engineer, infrastructure support, site reliability engineer, DevOps, and so on. It can take both contract or permanent style of employment. The average annual total compensation is around 150k USD or 1 million HKD. What’s being paid is the steep learning curve to understand new things, dedication to help others, and willingness to work in a stressful, busy, repetitive setting.
Career Progression:
Interview
Potential job applicants are often interviewed for their programming, people, task-handling, and crisis-triaging skills; but most importantly, personality. None of the above is a pass-fail criteria. Job applicants don’t need to process any specific knowledge. Even they do, every financial company is guaranteed to have different systems or apps. Past knowledge can easily be obsolete . The most important thing in the interview is whether his or her personality fits the team, and whether the interviewer thinks the interviewee can pick up the new knowledge and culture quickly. At the core of any application support engineer role is “following the book”. This why contracting roles are so popular these days. And it is increasingly difficult to find the right candidate, because what’s being sought after is not ant specific skill, rather finding the “right” person fit, which is almost as hard as picking a life companion.
First year
Once started the application support engineer career, the first year is always the learning stage. It can be quite frustrating to not know how things work, especially you are the one helping others with more experience than you. After all the system is huge and difficult to understand. Often you will find the person with most knowledge has already left the firm. During training each person could interpret the code and behavior in different ways. By the time you are trained by the 4th or 5th hand, the information might not even be correct anymore. Moreover, application support needs to master all the pieces in the system with hundreds of experts’ knowledge added together, because we are the bridge between the entire technical team and the business user team.
Second year
At the second year, you should be able to grasp the momentum of the work, automate some repetitive tasks, and know what not to care. This is also the time to train new joiners or pick up the bigger independent projects. However as your knowledge grows, responsibility increases in the same extent. The nature of the job remains the same, but there will be more coordination, meetings, and going the extra miles to help others. This is certainly a very rewarding experience; however, mostly likely by the time a user is happy, there are 10 things piled up in behind. Also, you could definitely start to feel grudge on others because it is the old things again and again like putting band-aid on the technical holes. At the end of the day, work is just about fulfillment with no originality or practical knowledge accumulation.
Promotion stage
Now it is close the to promotion season. It is common for application support lead or the manager to perform the same tasks and hold similar responsibilities as the workers, until you have climbed up further on the ladder as an IT manager. It is uncommon for an application support manager to get promoted to an IT manager who is no longer required to carry out business as usual tasks. Partly because the system knowledge an application support engineer possesses is very different to the overall architectural design, which is essential to lead both a group of support analysts and developers.
Some tips to excel:
- Since application support engineers play things out by the “book”. Document everything specifically. It is unnecessary to be correct, as everything is made and defined by people. The best approach is to act by the book quickly and then let someone else correct you. The hard part is how to go from zero to one, and this always requires bugging more experienced people to give you the information.
- During troubleshooting, gather only the facts without trying to explain it. Check for known issues in chat, wiki, jira, email. Make comparisons with previous behaviors, check release notes, compare for multiple environments. Finally reproduce the issue to gather more facts without debugging yourself, and give all results to developers.
- For communication to users, always leave extra room for the worst.
- Almost every application support team is understaffed. Multitasking, radical prioritization, and skipping bathroom breaks are so common in application support. Fix for this is building AI and scalable solutions on one hand, strictly following the rules and workflow on the other hand. Then, you can manage to balance user expectations and personal achievements. However this inevitably means to disappoint many people at start.
- Work is shared in all support framework. Setting up subject matter experts just rarely works due to the scale, interconnection, and modularity of the current software systems. Therefore I see the best solution as creating a fair mechanism to share the workload. Followed by unselfishly sharing all the knowledge within team and collaborating with developers.
- People need incentives to excel. Especially in a shared type of work environment. So an intelligent goal+achievement tracking system is the most needed piece in any application support team.
- Take it easy and laugh it off.
