Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

I liked this article because the roll of the programmer on wall street has been going down recently from my perspective.

Programmers used to work along side quants and were well respected. This was generally because practicing quants didn't used to be able to program. This was especially true in the 80s and 90's where programmers and quants where almost valued identically as one required the other to make things happen.

Somewhere around mid 2000's most quants started to be able to program pretty well. Not necessarily with C++, though lots (especially former physics) could use C++, but certainly with mat-lab, etc. This really shrunk the required programmer head count,

This, coupled with the fact that few programmers were trained in fields like stochastic calc, and the advent of offshoring meant that programming started to be come a lower status job around this time.

Some relatively small fields like HFT kept good programmers in need, but these jobs are relatively few and far between compared to the sell side bank jobs.

Now, programmers are much more valuable/respected once again, due to the requirement for top notch software, not even as a competitive advantage, but just table stakes to compete in the markets.

And like most fields programming in finance has really started to specialize:

- lockless programming, low level Linux, user mode network drivers, etc for HFT

- distributed systems, low latency messaging for quote dissemination in large systems like what most sell side banks run.

- real time risk limits, web UIs for helping to visualize and alert portfolio risk

- "production" modeling of quantitative models, for those that can span the programming/math boundary

A datapoint for the argument that "technologists can learn business easier than business folks can learn technology" camp.

This is a native recruitment piece for Goldman and other banks. It was probably orchestrated between GS and BBG.

That said, I think it’s genuine. Computer Scientists who work on Wall Street should not view their role as simply “a person who can write code.”

Lastly, this is from October.

Banks aren't the only financial services organizations out there. Look to get into the sector through smaller firms that do IR, asset management, etc. You'll still be paid competitively, and you can pick up knowledge about the sector. They might even foot the bill for an entry-level cert like the Canadian Securities Course (I don't know of any equivalents abroad but I'm sure they exist). With these under your belt, you will have a leg up in applying to a larger bank.

How large do you think that population of people in finance making 6 figures is in raw numbers? When you compare that to the tech industry, there are certainly high level engineers and managers that make 7 figure salaries all things included (especially given the growth in stock price at certain companies).