When I worked for a company who worked with big banks / financial institutions we used to run disaster recovery tests. Effectively a simulated outage where the company would try to run off their backup sites. They ran everything from those sites, it was impressive.
Once in a while we'd have a real outage that matched the test we ran as recently as the weekend before.
I was helping a bank switch over to the DR site(s) one day during such a real outage and I left my mic open when someone asked me what the commotion was on the upper floors of our HQ. I said "super happy fun surprise disaster recovery test for company X".
VP of BIG bank was on the line monitoring and laughed "I'm using that one on the executive call in 15, thanks!" Supposedly it got picked up at the bank internally after the VP made the joke and was an unofficial code for such an outage for a long time.
In most BIG banks, "Vice President" is almost an entry-level title. Easily have 1000s of them. For example, this article points out that Goldman Sachs had ~12K VPs out of more than 30K employees: https://web.archive.org/web/20150311012855/https://www.wsj.c...
Just like all Sales folks have heavily inflated titles, no customer wants to think they're dealing with a junior salesperson/loan officer when you're about to hand over your money.
It seems like every vendor sales team I work with is an "executive" or "director of sales" even though in reality they're just regular old salespeople.
VP at Goldman is equivalent to Senior SWE according to levels.fyi and their entry level is Analyst. I'm surprised by the compensation though. I would have thought people working at a place with gold in the name would be making more. Also apparently Morgan Stanley pays their VPs $67k/year.
Tech outstripped big finance corps tech a while ago.
Traders make loads, not the SWEs