[jwestbury]

You don't need a CS degree and you don't need certs once you've established yourself.

I've been in SRE or SRE-adjacent roles at Amazon, Microsoft, Dropbox, and now a quant hedge fund (the first three in the US, the last in London). My only degree is in English lit.

Your hardest step is getting into your first job with good name recognition in the tech industry. For this, your best bet isn't certs, it's networking -- find someone who can refer you, which will get you past the automated resume screening and get your resume in front of a hiring manager, at which point your degree and certs don't matter.

[hoagsobject]

How did you learn stuff for working in such companies? I always assumed you need a lot of math and theory to work in finance.

[everforward]

It depends on which area of the business you're in.

The quants (people who do the analysis to give buy/sell signals, basically, typically using programming for the analysis) will generally need a strong grasp of statistics and finance.

The developers that build the trading platform will need a strong grasp of exchanges and the mechanics of trading, but not really of statistics or "how the market works/reacts".

The developers that work on the reporting side don't really need a strong grasp of either. The math is relatively simple, the difficult part is handling stuff like cross trades. I.e. internally trading stocks between portfolio managers without having to hit the actual exchange (i.e. PM A wants to sell Intel, and PM B wants to buy, so you just transfer ownership instead of actual buy/sell orders). You have to attribute a profit/loss to PM A even though there wasn't a "real" profit or loss.

The SRE/ops side often doesn't require much knowledge of finance or math. The apps aren't particularly unique, and the portions of the trading flow you're expected to know aren't hard to pick up in a month or two. You aren't typically expected to have an in-depth understanding of trading strategy, or a highly detailed understanding of how trading works mechanically. Knowing that stuff probably lets you command a higher salary and title, but it isn't a prerequisite.

[philomath_mn]

Math and theory would be more important for a dev job, parent commentor is doing SRE.

[solardev]

What exactly does an SRE do (Software Reliability Engineer, right?)? I've heard the title before but don't quite understand it.

[sudofox]

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a term coined by Google.

The goal of the job is keeping large systems online and operational.

Think: systems engineering, DevOps, and sysadmin at scale - leveraging automation.

Lots of other shops still call it DevOps Engineering, Production Engineering, etc.

[doubled112]

I wanted to joke that some still call it sysadmin so they can pay you like one, but it is probably not as funny as I thought.

[dividedcomet]

Site Reliability Engineer - I’m one too lol. Most of what you do is work with dev teams to make sure their service is reliable, then slap an SLO (service level objective) to make sure their service meets a certain threshold of reliability.

[solardev]

Can I ask what your day to day looks like? Are you configuring services? Writing code and tests? Like what are the things you do for reliability?

(I've never been in a company big enough to have one of these, so I'm just trying to understand)

[a_vanderbilt]

It's going to vary based on the company you're with but a typical day for me includes reviewing/writing code, attending some meetings for projects, and answering pager duty when something goes boom. Occasional post-mortems and active maintenance of systems. I was up until last week an SRE at a firm maintaining an industrial information system and related services.

[sspiff]

More tooling, infrastructure management, high-availability, ... work.

Rather than focusing on making the software do X, it makes software that already does X more resilient to failure.

[sspiff]

I work at a fintech company as a software developer for 2+ years, and I've not needed any maths in my job really.

I think it strongly depends on exactly what you end up developing.

[dave1999x]

yeh, you do and most will want a degree at at least 2.1 even if you have a decades experience... unless you have the hallmarks of being rich e.g. went to some fancy school OR have a network that extends into a hedge fund

[jdjdjdjdjdjd]

Thanks! Yeah, my CV has a big financial organisation on it and a medium-sized university. I think getting a job with better recognition in tech is the biggest hurdle.

[ghusto]

Just want to confirm the parent comment is 100% spot on.

You don't necessarily need a better name on your CV yet. If you're just starting out, having a single financial org on there already is enough — as long as you can get good references.

Do something to skip the recruiters and talk directly to your potential colleagues.

[a_vanderbilt]

Everyone has their own journey, but I got into the market without a big name on my resume by doing things in my own time that got me recognition. I started giving talks about information security to local groups at colleges and whatnot. Wrote some software that did some cool stuff, and wrote books that no one ever read. Nothing particularly mind-blowing, but it got me the connections that gave me a seat at the table. Eventually I interviewed with a startup and they liked my work and pulled me onboard.