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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Note to people looking for job security: there is a HUGE need for developers who understand finance. The fundamental problem is that most finance people can't speak the language of software development (the biggest problem I've seen is that finance people tend to be very poor at writing out a spec of what the software should do - they're much better at looking at a set of examples and then telling you if the calculations are right or wrong). Similarly, most software developers don't know enough about the intricacies of the finance world when building financial software.

I had a colleague who (over years of experience) got to be so good at teasing out requirements from the finance people that I called him "The Finance Whisperer". His skill at crossing the finance-software worlds was unparalleled, and he could command a large premium for this knowledge.

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I would love to make use of my strong cross-disciplinary skills like this, but I see no evidence that this is actually true.

I'm not so sure. I reckon you just hire the people who know a lot about finance in to a Business Analysis role and you're OK. You don't need single brains that know everything, just people working well in a team.

Completely disagree. I'm not saying the dev needs to know everything about finance, but they need to know the nuts and bolts and how things that finance people care about translate down into software. Most importantly, they need to be well versed in the language of finance so they can have intelligent conversations with the finance people.

Just sticking another "Business Analysis" person in the mix just means there are more hand-off points where things can slow down and get confused.

We are probably both right - and the difference is in the size of company. For a start up you probably don't want a BA. Well you do, but as a role not a title. That person you call "developer" is really a hydra with many hats.

For a bigger company, the BA path (or SME - Subject Matter Expert, might be a better term) is like bringing in a expert in the team on finance. No different to bringing in a MongoDB tuning expert, or a React expert. Yes the developers need to learn some MongoDB/React/Finance etc, but the expert is worth having.

And having the expert reduces your need for unicorn people, the 10xers etc, and you can hire regular coders who are keen to learn a bit of subject matter (they should always be!) and the smart thing to do is send them on a course (rarely see this done in the real world - the normal approach is to let them introduce a bunch of bugs, get heat from QA and learn that way).

Interesting. Are there any other fields which desperately need this cross culture?

Health and tech. In the US the CURES act rules just went into effect. Personal health records are ours, finally, and workflows around managing and leveraging for life extension, health, quantitative self are just in early, early stages.

Real estate and tech. Rona is a full on once in a lifetime disaster for much of the industry. All of the financing models are going to collapse. But the buildings are still going to be there. And there is, finally, after 25 years, a full digital title workflow. So from the smallest details of managing them to the biggest deals in financing, selling, servicing, earning, and tokenizing- green field.

After 25 years? Was there a full digital title workflow in 1995 or are you referencing a wide adoption of the internet?

Neither; 25 is somewhat arbitrary, and I'm very much not an expert in the space, just an interested observer, but generally speaking the idea that the various artifacts and workflows needed to establish and trace and transfer and finance and so forth real property could be fully digital and supported by adequate legal infrastructure started in earnest in the mid 1990s with MERS [1], early eNote [2] work, and many others. I don't have good references handy for early work on digital titles themselves, but my understanding is that this also started, more with the rise of PCs than the internet specifically. This all has only recently reached maturity, and now COVID has accelerated adoption [3].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_Electronic_Registrati... 2. https://www.theice.com/publicdocs/eNote_White_Paper.pdf 3. https://www.dlapiper.com/en/us/insights/publications/2020/04...

There would surely be a huge amount. Another space where you'd need a whisperer would be anywhere near regulatory data. E.g. government mandating data is reported in a certain way. These are domain specific and typically cruel and unusual.

Aside from the obvious PayPal, SQ, and Stripe, would you (and other folks) please share some companies one should look into?

Big banks. I used to work at Morgan Stanley - they value this intersection a lot.

In my group, there were business analysts and developers. Guess who got more comp and recognition within the company? And there were a select few who could do both - they were intensely valued.

It's good career advice especially if you're working in a capacity where engineering is supporting a business, rather than the business itself.

Any sort of mid-to-large e-commerce company will have a large back-office ERP system (e.g. SAP, Oracle Financials, etc.) that needs to correctly account for data coming from the user-facing transactional systems (i.e. the website or mobile apps). How the transactional data from your runtime systems (usually stored in a relational DB) is accounted for in these ERP systems is tricky and can have big implications if not done correctly.

I would look at finance companies and banks directly.

There's a lot of very antiquated technology still kicking around in the finance sector, especially banks. You will likely end up working on mainframe code. It's something to bear in mind when considering making it a career path.

Those businesses are about transactions. Now think about assets, deposit and cash management accounts, and debt. Not so much about companies, but transformation of industries.

The aggregators. Yodlee, Plaid, MX, etc.

We're hiring at Remitly :)

Yup. I just commented above to someone, saying their accounting BA before switching to CS was a waste of time. Too bad they feel that way. Opportunities for that combination have never been brighter. Enormous niches in debt and banking are in the midst of a wholesale tech transformation.

That is great to hear! Would there be any particular tools or stacks to focus on? You mentioned tokenization -- is that related to blockchain?

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