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't used to be able to program.  This was especially true in the 80s and 90's where programmers and quants where almost valued identically as one required the other to make things happen.<p>Somewhere around mid 2000'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/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>- "production" modeling of quantitative models, for those that can span the programming/math boundary