On the Move, in a Thriving Tech Sector | Hacker News Reader

On the Move, in a Thriving Tech Sector

nytimes.com

39 pointsdarrellsilver13 comments

I am glad to hear that talented engineers are reconsidering careers in high finance and leaving Wall Street firms for startups that actually produce products that the public benefits from. It's good for them, and it has the side effect of starving the beast of an important source of talent.

Won't wall street then just start outsourcing development to start-ups (and consequently, start-ups who focus on this lucrative market)? I don't see how shifting the talent around will stop the finance sector from developing new tech.

It will be interesting to see if an aggregator like Yipit can succeed. I have used their services and they do help reduce the clutter that subscribing to multiple daily-deal sites tends to produce.

Perfectly-timed way to help people move out of Finance. A choice quote:

“If you ever read an article about an investment banker named Jim Moran cutting mega-deals for some finance firm somewhere, please come find me,” he told the man, “and shoot me.”

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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?

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.

Article aside, I still am skeptical about Yipit as a business. More and more daily deal businesses will shut down as the industry consolidates, making their research business less as time goes along. Which means they need to rely on their lead generation business. But come'n.. 1% of revenue from a Groupon multiplied by how many people? You will need millions of users... Plus more consolidation = less need for aggregation. In addition, they'll suffer the same problem as Groupon, which is deal fatigue. The open rate for their emails will decrease as time goes along.

Don't necessarily agree -- How many airlines are there in Kayak?

I've never asked them, but I suspect the Yipit team, in a few years, won't want their revenue dominated by this research business. But it's a hell of a business right now!

the need to compare prices for airline tickets is a real problem, no matter if there's 4-5 airlines. the need to find the best deal among 4-5 deal sites? Not so much... deal fatigue is a real issue but traveling is something a ton of people do daily. Aggregation is something anyone can do as well and I find it hard to believe a sustainable long term business can be built upon this model.. I mean seriously, take a moment to think about this without any bias? A business? A legit business? Aggregation of deals?.. really? really?

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