Not only risk aversion - they were really early in digitizing their baseline services, so many of them have quite old mainframes by now. It's difficult, expensive, and, as you said, risky, to change old code that the whole organization is operating against.

+1 to this. I've worked in tech but never enjoyed the "upgrade the system every 2 years approach." Banks and financial services are now regulated to be slow, methodical, and dependable post 2008. I found a manager I respect in a group that does work I'm curious about (options/futures) so it's a good fit.

Well, I work in finance and we do a lot of upgrades. We rarely touch the old COBOL systems. But we rewrite plenty of JSF and even AngularJS front ends. In fact, I created a system about 2 years ago that is currently being rewritten by a different team. So it does still change. I have never worked at a true tech company so I'm just assuming the change is slower.

Public utilities are high on that list, too. Old tech, stable IT jobs, good benefits, but (IMO) also boring as hell. My 2c.

Not the case; I work at a bank and we have widescale adoption of Kubernetes and cloud products (in fact most of the major banks do at this point)

If you happen to be looking for a DevOps or SRE role, check a large banks job boards, you'll be surprised how many open roles are available.

The scope of IT at a JMPC or a BAML is massive, and has grown both through acquisition and organically over decades. Virtually any technology you can think of is most likely being used or (at least being supported) by some unit at the bank. In a recent year JPMC's IT spend was $12 billion. In my personal experience (at JPMC) I knew groups who were using Clojure and Scala (while my manager assured me such technology was not authorized at the bank.) I knew of groups on AWS, on e on Azure and some using an internal Cloud Foundry implementation. (My group was running bond monte carlo's in an abortion of an IBM compute grid system straight out of 1992.) I personally knew of Mongo, Cassandra, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server and KDB installations. Kapital - possibly the most famous commercial use of Smalltalk originated at JPM.

The point is - it's difficult to make generalizations about orgs that big.

JP Morgan Chase Bank of America Merrill Lynch

My (rather out-of-date) experience with banks is that they have no problem adopting new tech but they don't retire the old tech. Add in a bunch of mergers and you get an unholy mess.

Yes! See my sibling comment . . .

I work in finance. My point was basically that the industry is usually slower to adopt the new stuff. Of course they will adopt cloud, but are the the first ones or are they 5 years behind the leaders. It seems they also tend to not change COBOL code often and are just adding new stuff in the new tech. So change still happens, but the scope and rate may be different than other industries.