[1mm Financial Talk] MZ Developers in Financial Companies at a Career Crossroad... "Finance or IT?"

[Asia Economy Reporter Eunju Lee] “Junior developer peers worry every day whether they should leave the industry before it’s too late. It’s difficult to expect long-term growth as developers.”

This is what an employee working as a developer in the banking sector said. As digital transformation accelerates in the financial industry, the demand for outstanding developers is increasing day by day, but the concerns of ‘junior developers’ who started their careers within the sector are deepening. Satisfactory salaries and stability are advantages that are hard to give up. However, as years of experience accumulate, opportunities to actually engage in development become scarce, leading to anxiety about being ‘left behind’ as developers.

According to the financial sector on the 14th, recently, ‘junior’ developers working at banks, securities firms, and financial public enterprises are seriously considering leaving the industry at the crossroads of choosing between development (IT) or finance. Especially for ‘MZ generation (Millennials + Generation Z)’ developers with about 3 to 4 years of experience, worries deepen due to the anxiety that ‘it becomes difficult to move as more years accumulate.’ They unanimously say, “We think about job changes and careers every day. If we delay any longer, we won’t be able to leave, so we have to decide now.”

Many choose to change jobs after much deliberation. Recently, at a financial public enterprise, Company A, there has been a string of junior developers leaving. Although it was an organization where job changes were rare due to high salaries and stability, there has been a significant increase in developers moving to completely different industries. An employee at the company said, “It’s not common to move to another financial institution; developers mainly move to platform companies where developers hold key positions.”

The background of these concerns is complex, but a common factor is that it is difficult to expect development growth as a developer in the financial sector, which is a major reason for job changes. Although there are differences depending on specific roles, most tasks focus on maintaining and managing current services rather than developing new services. Therefore, some financial sector developers do not engage in coding or direct development for as short as a few months or as long as nearly a year. A developer who requested anonymity said, “Development is the process of creating programs or apps by applying one’s own logic and reasoning. However, I did not write a single line of code for service development during my first year after joining. I felt a sense of self-doubt about whether I was really a developer.” In most financial institutions, developers are not sufficiently given opportunities to directly design new services or products.

The anxiety that accumulating years of experience without a sufficient portfolio will make future job changes difficult further fuels the concerns of MZ generation developers. Even if they want to move to major platform companies where developers are the main workforce, they worry that they cannot meet the coding standards these companies require in their current state. Another developer said, “Especially for major platform companies known as ‘Nekarakubaedangto,’ the difficulty of coding tests and interviews is so high that it is exhausting. Therefore, if one lacks experience handling large-scale traffic or massive customer data, or advanced troubleshooting (resolving errors, system failures, etc.), it may be difficult to change jobs in the future.”

Therefore, they fiercely debate whether to choose ‘stability’ by building a career in the financial domain with the advantage of ‘high salaries’ or to prepare for a phased job change even now. Those who choose the latter tend to consider stable routes to fill their experience gaps. They first aim to move to small and medium-sized fintech startups to build their careers, then move again to major platform companies. A developer at a fintech company said, “Small and medium-sized fintech startups are regarded as stepping stones for job changes among developers. Accordingly, well-known fintech companies saw a string of developer departures last year, and although upper management tried to prevent this, they failed to persuade them, so most left the company.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.