Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future
I liked this article because the roll of the programmer on wall street has been going down recently from my perspective.<p>Programmers used to work along side quants and were well respected.  This was generally because practicing quants didn&#x27;t used to be able to program.  This was especially true in the 80s and 90&#x27;s where programmers and quants where almost valued identically as one required the other to make things happen.<p>Somewhere around mid 2000&#x27;s most quants started to be able to program pretty well.  Not necessarily with C++, though lots (especially former physics) could use C++, but certainly with mat-lab, etc.  This really shrunk the required programmer head count,<p>This, coupled with the fact that few programmers were trained in fields like stochastic calc, and the advent of offshoring meant that programming started to be come a lower status job around this time.<p>Some relatively small fields like HFT kept good programmers in need, but these jobs are relatively few and far between compared to the sell side bank jobs.<p>Now, programmers are much more valuable&#x2F;respected once again, due to the requirement for top notch software, not even as a competitive advantage, but just table stakes to compete in the markets.<p>And like most fields programming in finance has really started to specialize:<p>- lockless programming, low level Linux, user mode network drivers, etc for HFT<p>- distributed systems, low latency messaging for quote dissemination in large systems like what most sell side banks run.<p>- real time risk limits, web UIs for helping to visualize and alert portfolio risk<p>- &quot;production&quot; modeling of quantitative models, for those that can span the programming&#x2F;math boundary