[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.