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

bloomberg.com

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

#61

Post by jabretti »

blunte wrote: post #49

Step back and consider the immense intellect and creativity being devoted to just making money.

Yes, but step back and consider the immense intellect and creativity being devoted to getting laid, or speculating about what's going to happen on Game of Thrones, or thinking up clever things you should have said half an hour ago, or complaining about what's wrong with Star Wars these days.

Or arguing on the internet.

Just a teeny portion of our species' intellectual output winds up creating or discovering anything of real value, but that's fine, we muddle through nonetheless. The finance industry has its role to play in ensuring the lights stay on and there's food in the supermarket.

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

#62

Post by odonnellryan »

meesterdude wrote: post #30
dookahku wrote: post #18

So how does a mid-level software engineer get into trading? I do paper trading on my own for fun but I'd like to make it a career.

Personally, i am working on building a cryptocurrency trading platform, because the API's are easily accessible - but the markets entirely different in behavior. Still, rolling my own implementations of technical indicators has been pretty insightful, and backtesting has shown whats worked and what hasn't in given market conditions. but i realize you're probably talking about more traditional markets like FOREX

What are you using to backtest? Data you gathered yourself?

Hardest part with backtesting in my experience has been trying to simulate successful buy/sell orders and the fees.

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

#64

Post by colordrops »

chollida1 wrote: post #2

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 happ…

I apologize for the off the wall comment. Every time I read about wall street programming, I've got this subliminal voice in the back of my head wondering how anyone could find the motivation to do this work. I'm obviously revealing my biases against the financial industry here. Also, I'm unable to make myself do work if I don't see it contributing to some greater vision or cause. Are there people out there who love finance and learn these types of specializations on the job, or are they hired away from other industries lured by big comp packages?

I guess it's just a case of lack of empathy on my part. I just can't understand why anyone would want to put so much effort and skill into making bots for farming money for a bunch of questionable people.

I don't feel too guilty for saying this. Every time a story about bitcoin is posted to HN, people go off topic and start complaining about everything that is wrong with bitcoin. I don't see the same when we talk about finance in general, even though similar sentiments apply, maybe more so.

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

#66

Post by tomrod »

colordrops wrote: post #64
chollida1 wrote: post #2

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 happ…

I apologize for the off the wall comment. Every time I read about wall street programming, I've got this subliminal voice in the back of my head wondering how anyone could find the motivation to do this work. I'm obviously revealing my biases against the financial industry here. Also, I'm unable to make myself do work if I don't see it contributing to some greater vision or cause. Are there people out there who love…

Cash motivates plenty of people, as does the joy in solving a problem. Whether the value of that solution to society's benefit is positive or negative does not always factor into a solution architect's moral calculus. This is how I explain your observed point to myself when I see folks stoked to work for $largetechco or $adtechco.

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

#67

Post by tomrod »

otakucode wrote: post #54
chollida1 wrote: post #2

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 happ…

Has offshoring ever been a significant factor in this arena? Given the profoundly proprietary nature of the systems being built, I would think that unlikely. Offshoring development is a good way to find your custom software reskinned and sold to a competitor without much legal recourse. Also, is 'mainstream' programming that common of a need? I had read (here on a HN comment thread) awhile ago that many organizations…

Huh. I see C++, Java, and Python as the go-to languages with my wall-street programming and modeling acquaintances. Very little esoterica.

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

#68

Post by throwawaygrad93 »

naturalgradient wrote: post #3

Can anyone comment on how competitive salaries are there actually? Right now, for top tier PhD graduates in machine learning, it's about 300-400k at big tech companies starting out, and ~200k for master's degrees. From what I read and heard, banks are not really willing to pay up competitively for software?

I'm a senior at an HYPSM school, currently looking at offers from one of {Google, FB} and one of {Jane Street, Old Mission, Five Rings, HRT, Virtu}.

The offers are about the same at about 200-250k depending on bonus and stock performance -- the big tech company upped their stock grant to meet the expected bonus at the trading company. It's not obvious to me which one will be more in a few years, and it seems like hours in tech are better. Can anyone weigh in?

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

#69

Post by v64 »

tomrod wrote: post #66
colordrops wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I apologize for the off the wall comment. Every time I read about wall street programming, I've got this subliminal voice in the back of my head wondering how anyone could find the motivation to do this work. I'm obviously revealing my biases against the financial industry here. Also, I'm unable to make myself do work if I don't see it contributing to some greater vision or cause. Are there people out there who love…

Cash motivates plenty of people, as does the joy in solving a problem. Whether the value of that solution to society's benefit is positive or negative does not always factor into a solution architect's moral calculus. This is how I explain your observed point to myself when I see folks stoked to work for $largetechco or $adtechco.

> as does the joy in solving a problem

This is it for me. Futures trading is a zero sum game (negative sum if you factor in fees), so writing a program to automatically extract value from an ever changing market is a nontrivial and ongoing project. But unlike a game, getting good at it can pay the bills in a real way. I understand that in the big picture long term, I'm not making much of a mark on society, but nevertheless it satisfies my personal and financial needs.

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

#70

Post by haskellandchill »

colordrops wrote: post #64
chollida1 wrote: post #2

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 happ…

I apologize for the off the wall comment. Every time I read about wall street programming, I've got this subliminal voice in the back of my head wondering how anyone could find the motivation to do this work. I'm obviously revealing my biases against the financial industry here. Also, I'm unable to make myself do work if I don't see it contributing to some greater vision or cause. Are there people out there who love…

You’re comfortable enough to be ethical about your capital, for me it would be a big constraint. I’m sure I’ll get to be picky someday but that’s years from now. And at least there’s cool maths :)
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