Are financial programmers under paid?

most people use 29west. everyone is colocated. everyone uses c++ for infrastructure. everyone connects directly to exchanges (fix and proprietary binary). infiniband, solid state drives, cep are all used. now fpga is the latest. IMO, this is commodity but you cannot hire anyone. most programmers are not good. i believe in the 10 years to be good at programming. also, most trades are not very complex at all. you might be surprised whats profitable.

 

As a guy who originally cut his technical teeth doing ASIC design, I find that very amusing.

 

What is the patent number?

I am not finding it in a US patent search.

 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Programmers Revolt Against Traders Making Way More $$ Using Their Algos

It's about time the inventors of the formulas designed to high-speed trade demanded higher pay.

Traders usually make a lot of money from trading because they have profit-sharing agreements with their employers.

The algorithms they use are created by back-office techies' who meanwhile are paid by salary, like Jeffrey Gomberg. According to Forbes:

Jeffrey Gomberg, 32, worked for a trading firm that paid him a low-six-figure income after four years on the job. His trader colleagues, by contrast, made millions manipulating the algorithms he'd written.

Many programmers are immigrants or were hired out of college and make $80,000 to $150,000 a year.

Making "low 6 figures," Gomberg felt used. So he and a fellow programmer quit and made a deal with HTG Capital Partners of Chicago. Now Gomberg keeps 40% to 80% of net profits and retains ownership of the code he writes.

“We designed this deal so we wouldn't lose intellectual property,” he says. “If it doesn't work out, we can go somewhere else and take all the software [that we developed]. That's really the key.”
HTG Capital Partners's owner, Christopher Hehmeyer, strikes an interesting deal with programmers.

If a programmer brings money with him, and puts up at least $250,000 to become an HTG partner, Hehmeyer hikes his percentage of the take.

As a result of the sweet deal, Hehmeyer is blowing up right now. He told Forbes he gets three to five inquiries a week from high-frequency programmers looking for better gigs."

http://www.businessinsider.com/prog...ders-algos-jeffrey-gomberg-htg-capital-2010-7

 

"What Do the Highest-Paid Programmers Make?"

http://adtmag.com/articles/2011/05/27/what-highest-paid-programmers-earn.aspx

 

the pay ways waaaaaaaaay better in the late 90s. Automating people out of jobs has been a way of life.

 

Programmers and engineers are underpaid in all industries in the rich countries.
Programming and engineering requires more knowledge, skills and intellectual horse power than most other jobs.
The reason for underpayment is that engineers across the world talk the same language: logic. So the rich world engineers are directly competing with poor world engineers who ask for much less pay.
A Master's degree 5 years experienced java programmer in India is paid 1/4 of the same profile in the USA. They use the same language, tools and methodologies, have similar productivity and are interchangeable.
A lawyer in the USA cannot be replaced by an Indian lawyer. You need to have specific knowledge of American law and an american degree in law.
So unless the salary gap between rich world programmers and poor world programmers does tighten, the rich world programmers and engineers will continue to be underpaid relative to the demanding nature of their job, because cheap international competition is holding salaries down.

 

Over the last three years I've had the pleasure of interacting with a LOT of "Wall Street' software jocks. Compared to their counterparts in other industries, they are, by and large, not particularly good, and significantly overpaid. This is especially true for those working at bulge bracket and other large institutions.

The quality of development in financial services - from spec'ing to implementing - is very poor, almost across the board.

 

I don't think the quality is poor because of lack of talent. I think the quality is poor because management doesn't care that much about quality or doesn't care about it all of the time. Business decisions override performance and quality decisions all the time.

And I'm not saying this because I'm blaming management, but because I eventually became management AND the programmer simultaneously. I would love to squeeze out every last nanosecond in my programs and have every piece of code documented, but the business is more than just the code. So, I have to have my programmer mind take a step back and let the business mind decide where to cut corners on quality so we can still take home a check.

I have rarely met a truly incompetent programmer on Wall St. Sometimes they have radically different opinions about which trade-offs need to be made where, but most code that gets written is at least somewhat functional. It could be I have had the luxury of working at places with high bars. Every code has segments of "WTF" everywhere -- there is not one programmer on the planet who doesn't have WTF code in a large enough project with real time constraints.

 

Look, this is true. IT programming is a sh*t business today because of the million of Indians who have invaded this space. Rates are horrendously low. Agencies who represent programmers run the show; they make the money while you do the work.
BTW: There are very few Indians with great design talent. Look at the BATS disaster as just one example. Of course, you won't HEAR of many disasters because corps like to hide their "dirty laundry".

Exactly. Good software takes time. Great software takes a lot of time. Many times you design it, code it and then discover there's a better way and you start over again.
Truly, it's both science and art...and it aint easy.
Compared to lawyers and doctors and accountants, programmers today are so underpaid, it's almost criminal.