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Comment by odiroot

5 years ago

Can you have a career in finance as an engineer with Python and without C/C++ (professional) experience?

Your post really made think it, it's an attractive area to work in.

6 comments

odiroot

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simonh  5 years ago

Also consider Application Support. I know it's not sexy rockstar dev stuff, but if you can get into App Support on the Quartz (or Athena I suppose) environments you get a dev account and access to all the tools. You can view all the code, config and running systems. If you have a good relationship with your dev team you can submit patches e.g. to improve logging. The live log files of all your applications are just a URL away.

If you're up for it, you'll spend a significant amount of time in the Quartz IDE. There are teams within App Support that develop monitoring and compliance reporting tools in Qz and do about 50% development. I know because I ran one. One of my team transferred into our dev team.

urban_winter  5 years ago

Yes. Many adverts will specify financial services experience but it's worth applying anyway. You'll probably find that roles in back-office technology areas (operations, finance etc) are less demanding in this respect. I hired mostly from outside the financial services industry because other industries had, on average, better-skilled developers, lower salaries and better development practices.

MagnumOpus  5 years ago

Absolutely yes.

Depending on what kind of engineer, it is far better to go to the finance (front office quant, back office risk) side than the tech support side. They are less snobbish about autodidacts and pay is far better if you are willing to learn about things outside the dev sandbox.

(Our front office has a few quants and ex-quants with electric engineering background, I don't know of any software engineers there.)

  • odiroot  5 years ago

    Thanks for detailed pointers. What's the deal with front/back offices?

    • FabHK  5 years ago

      Rule of thumb: the closer to the business (ie front office), the more money and stress.

      (Front office deals with clients, and in this context comprises sales, trading, structuring. Middle office run control functions, reporting, risk, compliance, etc. Back office would be settlement, accounting, operations, etc.)