Michal Szcześ: “I love solving difficult IT problems”

According to business analyst and project manager Michał Szcześ, working as an ITDS business consultant can quickly accelerate your career and help you realise your goals.

Michał Szcześ joined ITDS almost two years ago and he’s now one of the most experienced consultants in the company’s Polish team. His involvement in the IT industry stretches back some 13 years and he’s the perfect example of the fact that when you are ambitious and hard-working, interesting job offers will find you!

Meeting the growing needs of the banking industry

Michał’s everyday duties are linked to banking assets portfolio management for the biggest market players in the financial industry. This means that Michał, and thus by association ITDS, has expertise in the area of investment banking. He currently works on the Delta-1 team, trading ETFs and Custom Baskets. These allow clients to get exposure to certain indices, sectors or baskets of equities without actually having to buy them. The objective of his project is to build a new system to manage the instruments’ compositions (ETFs, Indices, CustomBaskets). He also feeds this data to several downstream applications, such as pricing, trading and risk systems. However, the legacy system has been written in old .NET frameworks, which is no longer efficient. The new system is in Java microservices infrastructure and uses the in-memory cache Ignite, thus providing the scalability and reliance that’s needed to meet the growing needs of the banking industry. “At the same time, we are building the new Angular-5 composition data browser and CustomBasket Builder application, which will give the most value to traders and middle-office teams.”

Adding value is key

When quizzed about what it’s like to be an ITDS consultant, Michał mentions the challenges he often faces. He loves  solving difficult IT problems, he says, because it gives him the opportunity to learn new things almost every day, such as new technologies like NoSQL databases (Mongo, Cassandra, Ignite), Rest APIs, Angular, Node.js, Kafka&ElasticSearch stack. These are all technologies that he was previously not familiar with. He’s convinced that for ITDS business consultants, creating new software that adds value for project stakeholders is their main day-to-day motivation.

Finding the right balance

Michał believes that cooperating closely with others improves you as a person. He enjoys giving colleagues a helping hand, being a coach and a business authority. What’s more, he reckons that inspiring your fellow team members will ensure you’ll never suffer a burnout yourself. Having been involved in the IT industry for 13 years, he cares about his own mental health and wellbeing. “I see this is a major challenge at the moment. Ever since I can remember I’ve always tried  to stay positive and to attain the right balance between work and my private life. It is absolutely true that the more you give, the more you get.”

After work

After a long working day, you’re more than likely to find Michał riding his bike. “It’s how I love to relax and I’m crazy about bikes. I have four at the moment and I’m thinking of buying another one. Representing ITDS during the Credit Suisse Tour in Poland was a lot of fun. It’s so nice when your hobby helps you feel like a real IT family member and succeed at work as well.”