[igorlev]

I think there's still a start-up stigma attached to programmers from financial firms. Unless you have high-frequency trading, algo trading or some other high end signal attached to your name, the assumption is that you are a cookie cutter, untalented programmer.

That's really sad, as the reality of financial programming is that there are lots of very smart, talented programmers working in back office positions. These roles are actually the majority of financial firm development and often require just as much technical knowledge and understanding as the flashy ones.

The flood of recently laid off developers who, unfortunately, are usually in the bottom quartile is further reinforcing this stereotype. Not to mention the push towards outsourcing actual development and pushing good employee developers into management or supervisory roles that was the practice at a majority of financial firms.

So while there are certain reasons that are behind this stigma, as is often the case in these situations, it paints lots of good developers with the same broad brush and actually hurts the start ups themselves as it restricts their pool of candidates.

[darrellsilver]

Agreed. There's a lot of skill in picking a job, much of which isn't indicative of your skills once in the job. IMO this often leads to people getting pigeonholed into specific positions if they don't happen upon the right opportunity or otherwise aren't inclined or encouraged to experiment or take more risks.

It's easier early in your career to try different jobs, and when you're younger the world is generally more accepting of letting you try new things.

What I love about this NYT article is that I imagine 6 years ago how it would have sped my departure (3 years ago) as a programmer on Wall St at a HF / quant fund.

[marquis]

>the assumption is that you are a cookie cutter, untalented programmer

What is it exactly that a finance programmer does? I've honestly no idea and would love to know out of curiosity.

[igorlev]

It would consist mostly of line of business applications. Everything from the aforementioned high frequency trading applications to record keeping (stock positions, cash balances, margin), regulatory reporting (tax forms, various bank reporting requirements), interfacing with other banks and exchanges, and lots of systems to handle the various steps of processing the various financial transactions like clearing.

Since finance these days is pretty much just bits on a wire and in some database there are a lot of requirements for redundancy, performance, reconciliations etc. lots of things to make sure your money doesn't just disappear. There's a lot of risk aversion for understandable reasons so most development is in battle tested/supported technologies like Java, relational dbs and C# more recently.

That is not to say that there is no cutting edge development as some banks have developed their own programming languages, databases, and large amounts of internal frameworks. From personal experience there's also a much larger push for developer efficiency with adoption of dynamic languages, nosql dbs and even practices like continuous deployment.

[marquis]

So from a technical perspective it can be interesting, but perhaps ultimately knowing all you are doing is keeping a massive finance system from falling over, and processing data as quickly as possible, day in, day out.. may become a little repetitive?

[darrellsilver]

Personally, what grinds is not the repetition, but the realization that

1) What's the point, really? Most all finance is really just ... not useful to anything. As an aside, Margin Call gets this point exactly right.

2) In most parts of finance, technology is a cost-center. Unlike other professions, there are truly sectors where technology is king, and developers impact the world around them.