Working at HSBC

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal

It’s my 5th day at work over at HSBC, the world’s local bank. Here, they aim to be the most preferred bank, by emphasising a lot on customer service.

It’s sad I don’t have a camera phone, else I can post some pics here of my workplace. Anyway, I’m sure you guys have wonderful imagination, so here’s what I’m gonna do:

[ picture of a mosque ]

As me and Yu Bin were walking towards HSBC (along the river), I pointed to the mosque and asked him, a local Ampang boy: “is that Masjid Jamek? As in the Jamek mosque??”. All I got was a shrug. So much for having a local boy as my guide. He did know some places for lunch around Petaling Street though.

[ picture of HSBC building on left and in front ]

Hah, hard to imagine this eh?? You see, HSBC has two buildings. One on Medan Pasar, and another one, on, uh… don’t know what’s that road called :p TWO buildings on the same street… they recently expanded too…..

[ picture of Wisma Hamzah Kwong Ying ]

My fellow trainee said (after one of us got from a guy who claimed to be at Wisma Hamzah Kwong Ying): “where got Malay and Chinese name together wan?!”. We all pointed to that building right across HSBC and went “nah!!”.

So much for not having a camera phone.

The entire HSBC uses Lotus Notes/Domino. I’m not sure how many around the world uses Lotus Notes, but I for one have yet to see why the heck anyone in the world would wanna use something like that. The interface looks like crap, it’s not entirely user friendly and I don’t like the development environment. It doesn’t make much sense, especially for a large organization. Poor HSBC employees, they have like a thousand and one username and passwords to remember.

At the end of the day, I doubt the purpose of industrial training is to understand the reasons as to why orgainizations pick certain technologies. I doubt anyone would bother to explain in detail the reason for their business workflow/process to be so tedious and error-prone. However, I think after my industrial training, I would be in a much better position to understand Microsoft SharePoint Server, Windows Workflow Foundation and stuff like that..

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Permalink | April 5th, 2007

5 Responses to “Working at HSBC”

  1. Jeffrey04 Says:
    April 6th, 2007 at 9:43 pm

    Shifting from technology A to technology B is always expensive in commercial world. Especially in backing sector. You have to consider the cost of upgrading, the cost of backing up, the risk of losing information during an upgrade because the information worth so much to them. There are just simply too much to consider, so you may be surprised to know that some banks are still using ancient programming language to build their system.

  2. alenn Says:
    April 7th, 2007 at 5:18 am

    as long as the system is workable, making profits to their organisation, not giving any troubles to them, and all they want is just $$, not an user friendly system.. so they just don’t give a damn of what system/technology they are using.. good luck to you.

  3. Ben Says:
    April 9th, 2007 at 1:13 am

    You didn’t sign any non-disclosure agreement?

  4. Jonathan Ng Says:
    April 14th, 2007 at 11:27 pm

    Haha, what I reveal here is not much of a secret at all :p In order to solve this 101 username/password, they signed on to use a system called V-GO Single Sign On. Press release.

  5. Eyrique Says:
    April 18th, 2007 at 5:52 pm

    So much for a secret.

    By the way, not having a camera phone does not really make your post boring-er. At least you made me laugh, it made my day! ^^ Cheers dude!

    My industrial training sucks. I have to carry my own laptop. Remember I asked you to imagine forgetting to bring a laptop charger to your office? Imagine now. I am damn bored doing nothing in office. Just for today anyway.

    Catch up with you laterz. Ciaoz.

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