Since I joined, I have been a huge fan and supporter of the ‘TAP’ program at the firm. It is not something unheard of – new joiners, fresh from their studies, before joining the workforce, do participate in a 14-week program, that gives them both a base in general programming, refreshing their knowledge, but also contains important building blocks related to the various ‘morganizations’ (about this in a later post probably :D) we have, so when you would be on your day 1 in your actual day-to-day role, many of the technologies you would be faced with would be familiar to you. The program is a big success, 100s of young talents are joining through it every year – in 2022, over 400 of them! So big of a success, that many cases lateral hired talents feel left out that they are not getting the same treatment 🙂 Oh, and as an extra benefit, your picture is displayed on the side of the actual Morgan Stanley HQ building on Times Square – and there is a camera feed in case you cannot visit it 🙂

One of the big aspects of it as I mentioned is getting familiar with the company specific technologies. This is helped through 3 different aspects at the same time. As part of the normal, day-to-day curriculum, some special blocks are designated to be about these specialized technologies, like how our messaging bus works or how you can connect to the firmwide directory – these sessions are generally proctored by my team; me included. Shouldn’t come as a surprise, I cover mostly C# and .NET as part of it 🙂 The second way you get more involved in the firm specific technology is through an ‘architecture exercise’. You are given a relatively complex problem, involving many moving parts written in different languages (C++, Java, C#, Python, etc) and techniques (message bus, file shares, etc) that you need to implement and would get scored (oh yes, everything as part of the program gets scored – you get many homework assignments, labs, etc that you need to execute well to be able to graduate).

Lastly, is the part that in some way is the most exciting for me, which is the project work at the end. Out of the 14 weeks, only 10 is spent according to the above – the last 4 is special and spent in smaller, 3-4 person groups, which are tasked with a project that was pre-vetted by the TAP organizing team and was submitted by the developer and business communities (because not just developers are in this program; there are separate tracks for engineers and business analysts too). I am now standing with the most successful projects ever title at the firm – more than 30 projects in the last 12+ years. So, you might ask, what kind of projects would I have? Let me share some summary of the projects of 2022:

• Had two different projects related to Augmented Reality – one for finding people and locations in the office; another one for finding equipment in a data center
• Had a project related to Electron, the UI Container, to make our open source project, desktopJS (morganstanley.com), to work with the newer version of Electron
• Had a project which hopefully would be able to open source one day, which is providing personally identifiable information masking in open telemetry
• Had a project building a realtime dashboard for server health specifically for applications using one particular application framework
• Had a project on creating the new conferencing website for the firm, so people can get to this information easier

Looking forward to what 2023 brings related to projects and my involvement in the Technology Analyst Program – in the last 3 years I maintained their internal website too, using the techniques explained at Generating… non-documentation | Dotneteers.net