demoship, if you want to transition into trading seems to me you could start working on a trading strategy during your free time. it can be done outside of market hours. if you can't come up with a profitable strategy, don't even approach them about switching to trading, cause if you switch and fail you'll be out on the street. protect that 60k paycheck until you know if you'll be any good at trading.
Don't worry about the compensation now. This is a stepping stone to your 2nd and 3rd jobs, where payday will come. What is your goal? If you want to become a Windows applications developer, then you need to gain experience in C++, C#, .net and Java (at least two of them), for instance. Whether this job is "a good deal" depends on your career goals. What tools and language are you using? Are you actually developing a real, complex application or just writing scripts and tools? If the latter, it will hinder you. Script/tool programmers are considered the low end of sofware engineers and the career potential and salary potential are limited. How big is your development team? Who do you work with? How big/complex is the application? Your next employer will ask these q's.
demo , I saw couple of your option's posts...very nice ; I am surprised to find out that you just out of collage. Find a low profile job(even for a bit less money ;you are developer , right ?) with a lot of free time on your hands and keep on developing/trading your own system from work. Something that nobody can ever take away from you. Or outsource to India. Phuck their miserable 5k bonus for 60 hours week
devil, the tools that I am working on are by no means simple. This "tool" is what the ops people use for 95% of their work. It contains about half a million lines of code. As far as the daily activities go, Yes, a lot of it is writing scripts and dealing with a lot of the same issues, but my team also works on larger projects as well Again, one of the reasons I took this job is because it IS for a hedge fund, and I figured this would be a decent start. I can't really go too wrong with this. My goal is to eventually find a trading position. I do get access to bloomberg at the office, and I can learn a lot about what they do. Unfortunately, this fund primarily trades fixed income products, and I primarily work with stocks and options. I believe there is one equity trader there though, so in the future, I could ask to be an options trader. Of course, right now my immediate goals are to learn what I can about this fund and their business, since that's a prereq of having ANY kind of leverage for asking for a different position, etc.. Also, job hopping right now is not an option, I JUST got this job, and looking for a new one is definitely not something I want to do right now.
Oh, as far as the languages I use go, there's a lot of them. - C# - Perl - Unix shell scripting - sql - tcl Almost ALL of the NEW programming projects that are being developed are in C#. The scripts that generate reports are done in perl/shell scripts + sql to pull the data from the database tcl is the language of one of the old programs that's being used. Everything that I'm doing except the tcl (which takes up less then 5% of my time, so who cares) are good things to get experienced with, so again, I can't go too wrong with this.
Congrats on the job. Just focus on doing your job well and continually finding ways to challenge yourself. Don't get caught up in the monotony and make sure to seek out extra responsibility. The harder you work yourself during your time at this job the more marketable you will be when looking for the next one. (not like you've gotten enough cliched advice) Good to See another Lehigh Alum here I'm class of 2003
Please continue posting about your activities. I am interested in learning how hedge funds operate, market their services and trade. What trading methods do they use and how do they develop methods? I suspect that if you bring cookies to the traders then they might become friendly. You might listen and learn from everyone there. You might arrive early and stay late, learn everything that you can and get to know everyone. Perhaps if a position opens up you might be invited to apply. I sometimes look for interesting sections of code by using find or search features on the editor. For example, if you search for the phrase "position size" then the editor might show a portion of computer code that describes the trading system.
Absolutely the best advice. My first boss years ago said "Take a job for what you can learn, and once you stop learning, move on." I pass that along to you. Your only concern should be the value of the experience and information you'll receive in terms of where you want to be a few years from now. The size of your paycheck right now should have no impact on your enthusiasm for the job, or lack of it.
I agree. When I started my first real job, I wasn't doing what I necessarily wanted to do. I spent time looking around hmmm. who's job do I want? It became obvious to me I wanted my boss's job. After about a year or so, I told him, "I want your job, I want your office". He got up from behind his desk and said "here you can have it". He was a great mentor.