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God I'm so fucking jealous of computer specialists who work in investment banks. How do I get in without going to Harvard?
by zump 10y ago
God I'm so fucking jealous of computer specialists who work in investment banks. How do I get in without going to Harvard?
- chillydawg 10y agoThey are exactly what they claim to be: specialists. You need to become one in some area that banks deem valuable. Current white-hot areas would be FPGA, machine learning (but you'll also want a PhD in statistics, or at the very least a good degree in it from a good uni) or be a badass systems developer who can write absurdly low latency code in terms of allocation, cache coherency, network sympathy and so on. To get this good, you need to have been doing it for a decade or more, so start now. At the bottom. No one leaves university and gets one of these jobs. They leave university, maybe get a PhD or work for a decade and work up to them. You are jealous of people who have put in thousands of hours of very hard work into their careers, but will you do the same?
- zump 10y agoGot any primers on how to write low-latency code?
- chillydawg 10y agoReally, you just have to start trying to do it. Find an old, good hashmap library in C somewhere, benchmark it and then try to reach feature and performance parity yourself.
- bboreham 10y agoLarge IBs do hire dozens of new graduates every year into IT. You have to be bright, articulate, interested.
- zump 10y agoThat tends to be Java CRUD not trading logic.
- alva 10y agoPlenty of downsides to balance out the high pay and the excitement of working with big transactions. The hours and level of stress take a heavy, heavy toll on many people.
- user5994461 10y ago> I'm so fucking jealous Don't be. They've had to work insanely hard to get into and finish Harvard, only to be granted hundreds k of debt. Then they had to work their ass harder to get into hard-to-get into-companies and acquire the experience required to get into even harder-to-get-into companies (i.e. investment banking). After a decade, they're finally there and all they got is long hours, too much responsibilities and no free food.
- zump 10y agoWhat's the hourly wage pre-tax after a decade of experience at these companies?
- user5994461 10y agoSo, you're in only for the money?
- zump 10y agoEr, it's trading... what else is there?
- user5994461 10y agoInteresting challenges, brilliant people, nice co-workers, instant feedback loop, lots of resources at your disposal, large company benefits (i.e. pension/healthcare), quality matters, work with grown up. A lot of which can't be found in the usual web startup.