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I am an HFT Programmer

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21–30 of 246 posts

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#21
post #14

How to get a really good salary: 1. Be really smart 2. Be willing to do something that's deadly boring to most smart people Me? I'm a scientist. I'm not gonna write your goddamn binary tree pricing algorithm or remove your varicose veins or argue about some dull point of legal text in court. But I'm sure I'd be a lot richer if I did. (In other news, man, those grapes sure look sour, I'm glad I can't reach 'em.)

> I'm not gonna write your goddamn binary tree pricing algorithm

I'm not in the banking industry, but writing a very efficient binary tree pricing algorithm sounds like super-interesting work.

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#22
post #14

How to get a really good salary: 1. Be really smart 2. Be willing to do something that's deadly boring to most smart people Me? I'm a scientist. I'm not gonna write your goddamn binary tree pricing algorithm or remove your varicose veins or argue about some dull point of legal text in court. But I'm sure I'd be a lot richer if I did. (In other news, man, those grapes sure look sour, I'm glad I can't reach 'em.)

3. Be willing to work for a corrupt industry.

Oh, I'm perfectly willing to work in a corrupt industry, just not to do boring work.

If anyone wants to hire me to build a planet-destroying supervillain weapon, email in profile.

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#23
post #5

That hourly rate is pretty crappy for that level and amount of work. (<$100)

Yes, consultants make more, but I'm under the impression that most consultants can't fill 8 (or more) hours a day?

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to what the top traders make, 0.5Mil / year is pretty embarrassing.

IT is generally considered a cost centre in banking, in essence, and so not rewarded like real traders, or sales people.

Not in HFT. It's one of their core competencies.

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#25

So he does what any good programmer does, but he earns 5x as much. One reason they earn so much is that the companies they work for have corrupt ties to the Federal Reserve and the US government, and when the money supply is inflated, they get all the new money, and can thus pay their programmers (and all employees/partners/shareholders/owners) with the new money. Their salaries come at the expense of people who don'…

Fun fact: the people on the internet who talk about economics the most appear to be the people who understand it the least.

This is unusual. I mean, the people on the internet who talk about Batman the most generally turn out to know a lot more about Batman than I do. And the people on the internet who talk about tae kwan do the most turn out to know more about tae kwan do than I do. But for economics it is, for some reason, the other way around.

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#26
post #5

That hourly rate is pretty crappy for that level and amount of work. (<$100)

From "Anonymous Cowards" calculations it was more like $74/hr if you consider overtime/oncall:

$500,000 divide by 52 weeks = $9,615 / week

$9,615 / (40 hours + (60 hours overtime x 1.5)) = $73.96 hourly wage

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#27
post #25

So he does what any good programmer does, but he earns 5x as much. One reason they earn so much is that the companies they work for have corrupt ties to the Federal Reserve and the US government, and when the money supply is inflated, they get all the new money, and can thus pay their programmers (and all employees/partners/shareholders/owners) with the new money. Their salaries come at the expense of people who don'…

Fun fact: the people on the internet who talk about economics the most appear to be the people who understand it the least. This is unusual. I mean, the people on the internet who talk about Batman the most generally turn out to know a lot more about Batman than I do. And the people on the internet who talk about tae kwan do the most turn out to know more about tae kwan do than I do. But for economics it is, for some…

I understand economics just fine, I just come from the Austrian School, which makes a lot of people angry (even though it is right).

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#28

they get paid well, but they're also doing work of dubious value. i left trading because i wanted to do something that i knew would make a positive impact on the world.

>they get paid well, but they're also doing work of dubious value. Unless they're getting paid at a rate determined by regulations, by definition the value of their work is what their employer is willing to pay.

Value to whom?

Suppose you work for me. I pay you because your work has value to me. Congratulations: you aren't doing something no one cares about. But your work for me could be (1) finding a cure for cancer (hugely valuable to everyone if it works out), or (2) making my brand of smartphone 0.1% better than its rivals (hugely valuable to me, positive value to others but maybe not much), or (3) writing effective advertisements that persuade people to by my product rather than a rival's which is actually slightly better for their needs (hugely valuable to me, negative net value to the world), or (4) assassinating people whose politics I don't like (valuable to me, presumably, but probably not so good overall).

If doing something that someone values is enough for you, then indeed getting paid is (more or less) a guarantee of that, and getting paid a lot indicates that you're doing something someone values a lot. But they might value it merely because you're sending money to them that would otherwise have gone to someone else. They might value it merely because you're creating value for them by destroying 10x as much value for others. If you care about doing something that's valuable overall then being well paid is no guarantee whatsoever of that.

(You might hope that if your employer is making money then someone values what they do, and so on recursively, with the process necessarily bottoming out at people doing things that are actually useful overall. Alas, that isn't guaranteed either; or, more precisely, there is no guarantee of any connection between what anyone is doing and its overall value.)

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#29
That comes to about $74/hour; he's rich for working 100-hour weeks.

I don't know what good the money is if you don't ever take the time to spend it, though.

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#30

So he does what any good programmer does, but he earns 5x as much. One reason they earn so much is that the companies they work for have corrupt ties to the Federal Reserve and the US government, and when the money supply is inflated, they get all the new money, and can thus pay their programmers (and all employees/partners/shareholders/owners) with the new money. Their salaries come at the expense of people who don'…

If he does what you do but makes 5 times as much as you, then you'd be a fool to not apply to such jobs.
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