For the most part, I agree with you. However, the lawyers and lobbiests really threw the monkey wrench into the entire IT business 10 years ago. The H1B visa program crashed the market with lower rates and salaries. There's been a tiny rebound the past 3 years, but it's likely a dead-cat bounce Now what we need to survive the next 3 years is a great algo.
I second this. And in areas of the country that have high concentrations of extraordinary programmers very few of them are at all interested in finance/trading. I think that generally the finance industry pays 20%-30% more for programmers of equal ability in other industries. But they very rarely are offered any equity in the company they are building. I'd bet for every finance programmer who 'made it' and is making 500K+ there are a dozen non-finance programmers that cashed out with 2M+ in options.
I spent 17yrs in IT in the valley (silicon valley CA) with a few different starts up. In 2007 I dropped out of the corporate IT world and a 150K/yr salary to day trade. Note it took me 3yrs to trade to a level where I was making more in 1-2hrs trading than I did in the corporate world (that was when I gave up the day job). I trade gappers for the first 1-2hrs a day. In 2011 I wrote an open source API using IB TWS API to try and trade the style/plan I trade for gappers. Its still very early stage but still ongoing see the following link for my app http://code.google.com/p/trade-manager/ The app implements a couple of simple strategies that probably incorporate 40% of what I actually do. I hope to in-corporate some AI and PGM functionality to allow the models to learn and find patterns. All future stuff that I'm developing with a couple of stanford PHD's (they donate time just for the fun of it!! its like online gambling for them) But yes having IT experience went along way to getting me to be profitable (other independent traders I know struggle with platform problems, planning having a rigorous process e.t.c ) the technical side of trading is simple to learn its the discipline and patience + having a plan is the hard part !!!
Bizarre, even books like these are starting to appear: http://www.apress.com/catalog/product/view/id/6103/s/9781430247289/category/92/
the value is based on the personality of a person/programmer and not as a whole. More than 50% of programmers are underpaid! They are just LAZY!
I agree with this; programmers are underpaid, even when they do jobs which requires skill and which is ever changing and challenging. While in other domain let say business or trading, you need to learn the rule once and you can survive for next 10 year but in programming technologies changes everyday. also if you are in consulting then you need to quickly adopt / learn the business domain which client is using; and even all of this does not bother me. but at the end of the day; you are been looked upon just as a resource; which i don't think is very respectful (this is my opinion no offense to anyone) because you are not actively contributing in bringing dollars to the company. so ultimately it is that where are you in food chain and who is in the control. I am a programmer myself and learning very hard this trading game so can step up in the ladder.
Oh, no, they get equity all the time, except it's the kind of equity that gives you zero upside. E.g. the girl who was my desk quant (read "glorified programmer") at The Second Great Evil cleared 350k in 2011, which is not bad for someone two years out of master program. However, it was all stock above 200 - so, she gets a base of 150, 50k of cash bonus and the rest was "equity".
I used to interact with these people daily as a "client". There are some pretty smart guys out there, but on average they end up doing tactical quickies and very quickly get pulled in to work closely with the desk or end up being integrated into the quant group. The project guys usually do suck. PS. From a trading managers view, I liked having a kid/gal around with a strong tactical skill-set (usually VBA+Perl+SQL, optionally R to shovel through my code) and pay him/her generously. The only problem was that every place I've worked, sooner or later these people were "integrated" into the IT group which lead to blah and next thing I knew they were gone.
it is supply and demand which was not mentioned even once in this thread. there are also a lot of headaches in hiring american workers including regulatory and legal issues. probably at this level issues like age or racial discrimination issues are close to non-existent. the same cannot be said for lower paid support staff. if you can outsource to asia or s.a. at 1/10 to 1/4 wage cost in the US +regulatory issues makes it worthwhile to consider if this outweighs the advantages of proximity
The problem is most programmers could care less if they work at Google VS a financial firm. They are motivated by a short term paycheck but they don't understand the business nor do they really try to understand.