Just wanted to say, thanks for the very interesting comment. I consulted at Thompson Reuters, and while they aren’t a bank, your story brought up all kinds of memories. The passionless part really resonated with me, since it was all too obvious whenever the one good developer (who I was thankfully paired with) and I had meetings with the rest of them. There was one guy in charge of the database, which in practice meant any time you wanted to interface with the database you had to ask this guy to do it instead of write any code yourself that even interacts with the database in any way, including just getting data. It meant hours of delays, routinely. During most meetings it would devolve into random tangents about cars. (The good dev was also a car enthusiast, so everyone came to him with all their car issues, much to his annoyance.) And yes, to be fair, it was a little fun and I enjoyed working with most of them. Very low ego, as you say.