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Comment by Imprecate | Hacker News Reader

I work for one of these firms. I think the article's creating a false dichotomy.

It's nothing like academia or a stereotypical think-tank. The environment is very aggressive, high-pressure, and results oriented. Nobody cares about your pedigree so long as your ideas work and make them money. Trading is one of the most purely competitive businesses in the world.

Most of the players are basically alpha male types who can do math and code. I actually think it's a great fit for people who are aggressive and entrepreneurial.

(And no, we're not front-running your orders or clubbing baby seals, despite the media's insistence otherwise.)

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I'm in the business as well, and the thing that I really appreciate about it after reading HN for a few years is this: no customers. You don't have to worry about sales and marketing if you're in a prop shop that trades its own capital, you just write software that makes money in the market and that's all you need to worry about.

True, though what appeals to me more is the flatness of the organization and the degree to which everyone's involved. I literally sit next to a partner writing strategies. It's nice working with people who have skin in the game, so to speak.

I've had the same experience in other small organizations, even ones with customers. You learn a lot since there's less isolation. Big corporate work is hellish to me personally since you can't see the result of your effort and don't even have the information to make good decisions.

Best of luck out there, but not too much. :)

Accurate synopsis. Also, the work isn't very interesting from a technical perspective, although being surrounded by really smart people is nice.

Most quant jobs, unfortunately, require C++, due to legacy code. Haskell seems to be making in-roads, though.

Depends on what interests you. I think massive distributed systems processing huge amounts of data using exotic network technologies and super tight code are interesting, but it's not everyone's bag.

C++ is still used a lot because it's fast and allows you to efficiently communicate with the hardware and OS. I'll admit it's ugly, but it's a good choice for certain systems. On the pure analytics side, most quants seem to be moving to more modern and flexible languages, where prototyping ideas quickly is more important than latency.

Jane St Capital uses OCaml extensively (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2336889538700185341...).

I'm curious to see if Google's Go makes any inroads. It seems well-suited to building these types of systems and does away with some of C++'s baggage.

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