Happy Path

I Work in FinTech

Between my first day at The Bank and Christmas break, I spent a lot of time in Charles's office, mostly trying to maintain my sanity. As I told my boss, I felt as if I'd been dropped onto an unknown planet and everyone around me was speaking a foreign language. I really and truly felt like an alien. Charles was patient and knowledgeable and tried to explain my new reality by answering my rapid-fire questions. During one of these sessions, I discovered the name of my adopted industry.

"You work in FinTech," Charles said casually. He was fleshing out a monster spreadsheet that would guide us during the new fiscal year. I could see him adding rows and columns on the shared computer screen he turned toward me when we toiled together on projects.

"Fin what?"

"FinTech. Financial technology."

"Shoot me now."

"Ha. Aw, come on. It's not that bad."

"Charles, if someone had purposely constructed a job that was the exact opposite of my interests and skill set, it would be one that combined numbers and IT." Charles humored, and even welcomed, my brutal honesty. I told him early on that he sold me a bill of goods to a job that was not the one I'd taken. And he'd countered that he didn't actually realize all that the job entailed until we essentially had to learn it together.

"But Molly, you're getting it."

"This job makes me feel like I have a learning disability." I looked up to the blurred figures moving along the hallway above Charles's office. "What I do isn't difficult, but the learning curve is really steep. I don't remember the last time I struggled so profoundly."

"There are a lot of systems unique to The Bank. And you're also having to adjust to a totally different work environment while you learn all this stuff. I get it." He was positive and supportive and encouraging. It was a revelation to have such a strong boss after my previous experience.

I thought back to an incident in ninth grade. I was new to Canada that year and the guy I was going out with was a bad boy. One day we were down at the beach with his friends and he was rolling a joint. He asked me to "rip up the roaches" and nodded toward a small pile of papers on the log next to where I was sitting. Having no idea what he was talking about, I started tearing up rolling papers while the roaches sat untouched. He thought my innocent mistake was hilarious, but I was mortified. I often felt that way at The Bank. I was just doing what I thought was right and learning from my plentiful mistakes and misassumptions.

Often, I embraced my ignorance. The fact that I knew almost nothing about the field or the processes of my job made me unabashed. I really didn't care if I looked like a fool in front of a bunch of people I didn't know who had expertise in an area that was largely a mystery to me. There were countless times I would ask questions that I knew would make me cringe in hindsight. It was a necessary evil.

One day a senior manager came to my desk and thrust a pile of papers in my face. "Are you trying to configure this work, too?" he asked.

"Since I don't know what that is, I'm going to say no."

He looked askance and walked away. Did I feel stupid? Should I have felt stupid? No idea. With ignorance comes audacity. I had very little training and zero background in FinTech, so I had no compunction about my abilities or lack thereof. The things that needed to get done were getting done. The rest I'd either learn in time or I'd remain blissfully unaware.

Because Charles was doing me a favor by offering me the job, and I was doing him a favor by taking the job, we had a mutual unspoken understanding. Neither of us would make the other look bad. As I said, my job was not high level. I wasn't faking my way through coding a complex program that would be fed to 2400 ABMs across the country. I was drawing up contracts and keeping budgets and taking care of invoices. It just so happened that I was doing all that for a bank group that worked in FinTech, so the language and systems used to do my job had to be translated and learned.