Breaking News!

So, I just got an e-mail from one of my friends who was working with me in London during the summer. For those of you who dont know, I did an internship with Credit Suisse First Boston in their London office in their IT department. I suppose about a month ago, they called me offering me a full time job on their 2005 graduate programme starting in July 2005. As my current job isnt exactly setting me on fire, and the job in London pays almost twice as much, I told them that I would take it. I mean there are a load of reasons why its a good job to take, not least that London is a great city, but I wont bore you with them now.

Right, so back to my original point. I got an e-mail with a friend who also did the internship with me and who also got a job offer from CSFB. But today he told me about CSFB announcing 6,000 job cuts tomorrow. I checked out the Financial Times website and low and behold, there are articles on their pending announcements. There are rumours that they're going to focus on specific areas of investment banking and selling off their Equities business. This is especially worrying considering that I was working in the European Equities IT department during the summer! The articles in question that have me shifting just a little nervously in my chair are: this and this.

I dont want to get ahead of myself and say that I now cant take the job offer, but it is definitely food for thought. However, having read the articles and especially the first one, it seems that it isnt all that bad. I mean they're predicting 6,000 job losses, but only 20% in London. And I get the impression that they're just offloading their non-core business eg Winthur, their insurance arm. I dunno. I'm not going to ramble on here for ages trying to predict the actions of a multi-billion dollar business, and just wait until the press release tomorrow. I should also probably contact the few people inside the company that I know. I need to do that anyway to make sure this new job is for me, but also I need to do it now in light of this.

I suppose the other breaking news that will come as a complete shock to you all is that I slept out yet again this morning! I only got into work for 9.45am. I woke up just after 9.00am but even when I realised I was late, I just lay there for a good few minutes. Its probably bad that I'm always late, but then again, nothing has been said to me and I do my required 37.5 hours a week. I'm not the only one that comes in late and stays on late. Its seeminly up to me when I decide when I do my hours. But I should really try to do the normal 9.00am - 5.30pm times like most others.

The third piece of breaking news is that I only slept for a small bit on the way back up to Dublin last night with my sister. I usually pass out half way up and wake up outside my apartment door. But not last night. I did nod off for a while, but by and large, I stayed awake most of the way up. I'm quite happy with myself. I really wanted to and in hinesight should have slept all the way up, but I would have felt bad. My parents are always warning me to stay awake and keep my sister company.

My weekend back in Cork was fairly predictable - volleyball. I went playing in the Mardyke Arena and then met up with the others later on for a house party. I stayed over at a friends house and got about 4/5 hours sleep Saturday night. I was worried that when going into volleyball on Saturday that I would be stopped for not being a student. However, as luck would have it, I knew the woman on reception and she recognised me. She said "You're a student, aren't you?" to which I obviously said yes! Saved me a lot of hassle and probably €5. The session wasnt bad, but for the life of me, I couldnt make one good pass. I made about 3 during the session, but all were complete crap.

I just did a quick search for more news on CSFB's job losses. I've found a couple other articles, which have left me a little more confident. The first one is from Reuters with the other from Bloomberg. They both hint at they offloading Winthur and merging some equities and fixed income research teams, which isnt too bad at all. Anyway, as I said before, I'll wait until tomorrow and find out exactly what they're doing. One thing that seems for certain, is to change their name to "Credit Suisse" by dropping the "First Boston" bit.

Well, better get back to the daily grind of debugging code that I didnt write or mess up. Seriously, I havent "cut" any new lines of code myself in ages. I seem to be just trying to fix some mistake that I didnt make for the past week or so. Hopefully by tomorrow I'll have more news on CSFB, or is it CS?