Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 195 posts

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

#161

Post by robbyt »

marvin wrote: post #149
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?

As a Norwegian software engineer, my mind boggles when reading the salary discussions of engineers based in the big cities in the US. Most engineers here are paid a small fraction of the numbers you cite, even though we are decidedly a first-world country. I guess good ML people will probably get over 100k here, but I haven't heard of anyone near 200k. Any thoughts as to what causes the massive difference?

The dollar is massively over inflated in major US cities. Studio apartments in Manhattan sell for $800-950k. A loaf of decent bread costs $6-8. A beer costs $8 (plus tip). I know that Norway is also expensive, but is it this bad?

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

#162

Post by throwaway_hft »

jabretti wrote: post #151
alexcnwy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, quant vs. programmer is a false dichotomy since most quants did degrees like mathematical finance, actuarial science, etc. where computer science and numerical programming courses are part of their degrees.

Depends where you go. Some firms have a very bright line between "quants" and "programmers", and you don't want to wind up on the "programmer" side of it.

Agree 100%. First firm where I worked the programmers were treated like monkeys, and the traders, some of whom weren't even that bright at the time, were almost godlike.

Some other person wrote on here about traders being angry assholes. That firm had a ton of angry asshole traders because they'd push and push and push on deadlines, didn't understand the system at all, got hacked up buggy code, never invested in unit or system tests. It was an absolute disaster.

Little anecdote: First year I was out with a more senior trader on my team over drinks. He was talking about the glory days of 08 where every single trader earned a million dollar bonus or more. I asked about the one infrastructure developer who came up with a system to use multicast to simultaneously publish our EuroStoxx signal to DAX along with a dozen other instruments. Nothing earth shattering in 2017, but it quadrupled our P&L and market share at the time.

He got 10 grand.

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

#163

Post by bousaid »

physguy1123 wrote: post #152
bousaid wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to learn more I’d also suggest reading a book called Flash Boys. It’ll give you huge insight into what OP is talking about.

Flash boys is mostly incorrect and at points misleading, and this is coming from somebody whose entire job is trading systems to avoid hft "picking off" my institutions orders/market activity. I can write more once off mobile but there's good material online about why that's better written than what I would write.

Thank you, I’d be very interested in learning more!

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

#164

Post by colordrops »

mac01021 wrote: post #126
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…

Doesn't this sentiment preclude you from almost every programming job? It's almost always going to be about finding the optimal way to funnel money toward whoever is in control of your employer.

Yes, it took me about 20 years to find an employer I am happy with, and that included myself for a while in the list of those I wasn't happy with.

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

#165

Post by yalph »

throwaway129999 wrote: post #33
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 in the range of 3-5 years out of undergrad, working at a quant firm. My total gross comp for this year will be about 400-450k, majority of that is bonus. By quant firm I mean either a proprietary trading firm (no outside investors) or a hedge fund (takes outside money), but not a bank. I have a CS background but have self-studied in stats, and received mentorship from people with strong math backgrounds. Main adv…

May I ask what is the area you work on? HFT, derivs etc? Also are you a developer or trader?

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

#166

Post by log_base_login »

carterschonwald wrote: post #148
log_base_login wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it helps to understand that the financial sector provides capital that serves to energize virtually every other sector in every industry. Without finance, there is no biomedical research (private especially). Without finance, there is no aerospace advancement. Without finance, there is no alternative energy. Being able to facilitate a more liquid, more transparent financial sector is, in my opinion, a calling…

WELL said! :) I stumbled into finance a few years ago and I’ve had overall the best bosses and work env ofanyone I know. I’m also doing a more audacious program of research engineering/ computer science than I could likely do anywhere else. I like to sometimes describe my work as some combination of “making the systems that fund aerospace at least as reliable as commercial aircraft”, as transparent as intergalactic v…

Thanks for the praise, and for the insight per your experience. Sounds like a great gig!

I looked you up, and see that you are likely working exclusively in Haskell, but thought you might derive some value from Carl Cook's presentation on optimizing HFT code at the most recent cpp convention. I recognize the languages are distinctly different, but he provides some interesting theoretical points along the way that might be advantageous to you.

Here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM&feature=youtu.be

Also, I can sympathize with your plight to run scalable sims. I've done some work in bioinformatics, and am building a small cluster at home so that I can learn to write code that'll scale to more massively parallel systems that are de rigueur in that domain.

Cheers!

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

#167

Post by havkom »

smallnamespace wrote: post #38
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…

> This, coupled with the fact that few programmers were trained in fields like stochastic calc, Anecdotally though, I've met plenty of coders who did this to themselves by refusing to learn more about the domain or the business. They basically silo'd themselves, then wondered why their colleagues didn't treat them as an integral part of the team when they couldn't speak the language or understand the concerns. Taught…

I could not have formulated this better myself.

All but a few programmers I have met have tried to understand the underlying reason for their employment and the businesses issues they are employed to solve.

This approach have caused programmers to loose a lot of influence and status.

10 years ago companies had developers develop their own customized CRMs, which can really benefit a company if their domain-specific needs and processes can be integrated to such core-business software.

Nowadays, Adobe Campaign have a cake walk selling their bloated, general and non-tailored “CRM” solution to business.

How can they Adobe etc do this? They approach the marketing and sales team and offer a nice slide show.

Why does not IT or programmers even get involved before the purchase? Because no one likes talking to the idiots in IT that does not understand the businesses needs. They only nag about some “technical debt” (that no matter how much money is poured on the teams never disappears) and the need for re-writes of fully functioning parts of the system that introduces new bugs.

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

#168

Post by golergka »

throwaway129999 wrote: post #33
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 in the range of 3-5 years out of undergrad, working at a quant firm. My total gross comp for this year will be about 400-450k, majority of that is bonus. By quant firm I mean either a proprietary trading firm (no outside investors) or a hedge fund (takes outside money), but not a bank. I have a CS background but have self-studied in stats, and received mentorship from people with strong math backgrounds. Main adv…

How did you change fields, what was your transition like? Was it hard to interview, being self-studied and without a degree relevant to the field?

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

#169

Post by marvin »

robbyt wrote: post #161
marvin wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Norwegian software engineer, my mind boggles when reading the salary discussions of engineers based in the big cities in the US. Most engineers here are paid a small fraction of the numbers you cite, even though we are decidedly a first-world country. I guess good ML people will probably get over 100k here, but I haven't heard of anyone near 200k. Any thoughts as to what causes the massive difference?

The dollar is massively over inflated in major US cities. Studio apartments in Manhattan sell for $800-950k. A loaf of decent bread costs $6-8. A beer costs $8 (plus tip). I know that Norway is also expensive, but is it this bad?

This isn't the whole explanation, unfortunately (I really want to understand this relationship). A beer costs more in Norway, a good loaf of bread would be $6 (although you could probably get a cheap one for $2-3), a studio apartment in Oslo would be $300k-ish.

So the biggest price difference is in the rents, or the housing prices. I would probably increase my savings by a factor of five or more if I had a salary like the ones cited in this thread :)

Obviously it's supply and demand, I just wonder which side of the equation is skewed and why.

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

#170

Post by cyberpunk »

arenaninja wrote: post #103
jaymzcampbell wrote: post #5

I wonder if this will see an ability to more easily switch into fintech/banking as a developer working in various other industries. I worked with GS via a mobile agency for a while and really respected the developers and what they were doing from an engineering PoV. I had always viewed that industry as essentially closed unless you got in straight after graduating. Has anyone ever made the switch into an engineering…

Not working on a fintech but FWIW I work on trading platforms for a well-known investment bank. Getting in was not particularly difficult but even with some experience you may need to network with someone on the inside to get your resume in front of the right recruiter, simply submitting your resume via the usual channels appears to be a crapshoot (though I had never applied here because I wasn't aware they were in t…

Would I be correct in guessing from your username that you work with FrontArena? It seems in-house coustomisation of those kinds of systems isn’t paid very well (although I know some murex guys who get paid quite a lot as consultants).

What does the day to day look like working on these beasts? Are you in Europe? Most of the developers I know working on these platforms seem to be quite silod and not really involved with the programmer ‘scene’ as it were (all using windows, no opinion on editors, never heard of hn, don’t care about this weeks $shinynew etc which I know shouldn’t be any kind of grading scheme but it always strikes me as a bit strange).

Would like to hear your opinions on it: are most people who end up working here turned into these (generalisation warning, I know not all) unmotivated souls by the sheer pain of working on this stuff or does it just attract candidates who don’t really care that much about tech?

Post reply on HN