| It depends a lot on what the average Wall Street Firm would do with that programmer. Is the hacker going to be doing (for example): 1.) IT Admin stuff (Creating accounts, internal admin tools) 2.) Backoffice Dev (plumbing code to book trades, query databases, feed data to risk and PNL reporting tools) 3.) Infrastructure (writing fast code that talks to exchanges to trade autonomously, or writing tools to help people run lots of regressions, experiments, and simulations with ease) 4.) Desk Quant / Quant Dev (writing valuation models, trader UI, tools for trading, tech support for traders, structuring new products, building the grand unified system that processes financial instruments) 5.) Prop Trading (finding new ways to trade for profit; systematizing that into software) I'd say anyone who is skilled at either 3,4,5 is going to generate more value to the Wall Street firms than what most startups budget for hacker employees. |