I never needed programming for trading stocks, but lost much when I added commodities and not until year seven, learned enough to program Tradestation back in 1992 and before that used Supercharts but was not able to program this in 1989, and before that was Futuresource, also could not program. But once was able to program, bottom line changed as day trading is often not what brain thinks markets should work. I programmed my own of Tradestation and Ninjatrader till 2010 and then hired staff for automation in python, and now have a partner who programs when he has time. Doing far less programming now as brain unable, getting older is tougher, lose train of thoughts, but still develop systems to be programmed. Much less on back testing, at some point one knows what should work, more on forward testing and debugging code and system. I think too many get into trading completely unaware of the skills required, not like reading a book over the weekend on how to make chocolate chip cookies.
It's fine.. I don't know how much the moderately successful guy pays the coder, pretty confident it's under $40-50.00 an hour, but I don't know that factually. The one really successful guys pays someone on an hourly basis over $200.00 per hour. I know that factually.
The reason why banks have so many coders is they do not simply trade 1 market but several different markets at the same time, in correlation ofc. some of those markets are interbank only and even worse to predict than the public ones. Besides that they do not only bzy and hold for profits bzt also for daily business, means there is an additional planning aspect to it. Then there is also reporting under regulations which has to be considered to be coded in. Thats why they need an army of coders, while you might get profitable with only 1 to a few heads.
There doesn't seem to be a way to do this yourself but you might contact an admin, I think they can do it.
Backtesting and execution are almost two distinct worlds. In the former, you're focusing on speed, analysis and data errors. In the latter it's mostly error handling, maintaining connections, making sure positions are handled correctly -- not leaving anything open, understanding regulation and how that might affect executions.
I write my own code for stocks, but have not been able to come up with anything that tells me when bluffing / manipulation is going on. So in a nutshell, you may be a genius coder but if you can't join the ranks of those who push and pull price around, it's an uphill battle. Price manipulation is both hard to detect and underestimated by retail traders imo. Not so much on very large caps though.