7 ms·

I've been developing in C, in the finance industry as a high frequency trader as well as being a father. My son is home schooled and is typing elementary level

by HFTGuru 10y ago

I've been developing in C, in the finance industry as a high frequency trader as well as being a father. My son is home schooled and is typing elementary level sentences at 3 years old, he can also strum the guitar playing notes C D E F G A B on request. The down side is I work 10-12 hour days, but I get a performance bonus between 400k and 800k every year. I'm hoping I can retire in my late 30's, but I do miss out on a lot of time with my son and I always ask myself is it really worth it... Who know's though, I'm going to ride out the HFT route as long as it exists.

lj3 10y ago
Do you mind if I contact you offline so I can pick your brain about HFT and how you got into that? hn@lj3.me
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
satysin 10y ago
Personal opinion... You can always work a few more hours/weeks/months/years when your kid is an adult and living their own life but you won't ever be able to get those childhood years back. Also 50-60 hour work weeks are not healthy for you in the long term unless you are very vigilant with how active you are and take regular (every hour) breaks. Also anecdotally I know several people who planned/hoped to retire in their late 30s/early 40s. None of them did and are still working now in their 50s and even one in their 60s. Mixture of reasons from health problems in the family to financial issues to just not knowing wtf to do when not working now their kids are adults and living their own lives.
- patja 10y ago
  It is also easy to lose sight of the fact that once your kids are in their teens, they really start living their own lives much more so than in the past. You don't see that you are going to say goodbye to your days as the family's benevolent dictator, waking up in the morning and declaring "today we go to the museum" (or on a hike, or to the workshop to build something together, or ...) so make the most of those formative years while you are still the sun their world revolves around!
- nunobrito 10y ago
  Just to help with feedback, I'm one of those who retired before 30s. Not rich but enough savings to live on a (humble) tropical island until old age. I wasn't able to stop. Applied my savings in day trading, everything went well until 2009 happened and most of it washed away. Applied what remained on the tuition of a top university to up my academic credentials and then went on try other tech industries (e.g. aerospace). Today have a small startup (Europe). Life is hard (empty bank account at the end of the month) but the plus side is that your brain keeps active. If you really like writing technology, in my opinion it gets difficult to stop doing what you naturally enjoy doing.
bfrog 10y ago
How have you not retired yet with a 400-800K bonus is the better question?
- otterley 10y ago
  It takes about $6M to retire at that standard of living at such an early age.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- schlumpf 10y ago
  Because, the IRS.
exwebtina 10y ago
I retired in my early 40s. It was surprisingly boring.
- estefan 10y ago
  I think there's a reason lots of famous billionaires keep working. I've been hearing from my parents how boring retirement is, and from my own experiences of extended vacations I've come to the conclusion we evolved to work. "Man's Search for Meaning" by Frankl graphically illustrates the importance of having a sense of purpose, which I think a lot of people lack when they retire to live the dream of doing nothing. I think the key is to be able to choose not to have to work for some asshole boss, or do work you don't generally enjoy. I've become very disillusioned by the dream of insane wealth and the ability to retire early. Instead, I want to work on something I feel will make a difference and that interests me for the foreseeable future.
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  I'm not on the same wavelength as retired people who complain about boredom. If I retired today, I literally have a >5000-line list of ideas, topics and activities I want to pursue, most of them inexpensive or even free to pursue financially for developers, but time-consuming. You could develop software to largely automate the municipal bureaucracy of a village in your nation. It takes a surprising amount of paperwork, and manual labor, to perform even the minimal amount of compliance work to maintain a village. You could work with leaders in each tax levying jurisdiction to agree to publish tax data in a standard online format. You could develop a backyard automated chicken coop, Creative Commons the plans and see what improvements everyone else comes up with. You could develop a vanadium redox battery-powered lawn light, and save landfills from the garbage disposable lights the big box stores inflict upon us today. There is simply an endless sea of opportunities to imbue life around you with increased cognitive density. My head fills with an idea or two every day (usually about improving something I run across in daily life), that acts like an earworm, which I have to write down to "purge out of my mind". It got much "worse" with the advent of search engines; when I was "stuck" with school/university libraries, I would often run into dead ends researching ideas, and could quell the earworms with the thought that I gave an honest effort to run down a thread of an idea. I thought everyone thought like this, but was just better at focusing upon the task at hand and banishing these idle thoughts. I much prefer the situation today with search engines: I'm much faster at running down enough of an idea and putting it into writing to purge it out than before.
joslin01 10y ago
Which B is he playing? B7? Cause if he's barring his chords already... man you did a great job.
mjolk 10y ago
Is this an outlier comp package? When acting as an employee, I make far less, am only there for the money, and still work 10-12 hour days.
zump 10y ago
Not this again. Someone will always make a post about earning a ridiculous salary that will ruin my entire week. I just don't believe people can add 800k of value to an organisation.
- trcollinson 10y ago
  Really? That's a bit short sighted. I have worked with numerous teams that have produced far more value to the organization than that, and I wasn't in high frequency trading. For example, at HP my team of 10 individuals (1 sales, 1 marketing, 1 PM, 7 engineers) produced a well known SaaS product which produced about $800MM in gross revenue at about a 60% margin for HP. That's a whole lot of value per employee.
  - zump 10y ago
    Did you get appropriately reimbursed?
    - trcollinson 10y ago
      The quick answer is no. The funnier answer is we received an award for this particular piece of software (which is still in use and sold for phenomenal profits to this day). We were invited to go to an HP board meeting and receive the award directly from Meg. Unfortunately our entire office was shut down and we were all laid off before the reward date so that our division could save on overhead. Our division manager (who I met on the day we were laid off) accepted the award graciously.
      - zump 10y ago
        Funny, perhaps HFT is an industry you should consider if you wish to be generously rewarded.
        brokenmachine 10y ago
        I bet if they were paying $800k they were making at least $8M.

by HFTGuru 10y ago

lj3 10y ago

Do you mind if I contact you offline so I can pick your brain about HFT and how you got into that? hn@lj3.me

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

satysin 10y ago

Personal opinion... You can always work a few more hours/weeks/months/years when your kid is an adult and living their own life but you won't ever be able to get those childhood years back. Also 50-60 hour work weeks are not healthy for you in the long term unless you are very vigilant with how active you are and take regular (every hour) breaks. Also anecdotally I know several people who planned/hoped to retire in their late 30s/early 40s. None of them did and are still working now in their 50s and even one in their 60s. Mixture of reasons from health problems in the family to financial issues to just not knowing wtf to do when not working now their kids are adults and living their own lives.

patja 10y ago
It is also easy to lose sight of the fact that once your kids are in their teens, they really start living their own lives much more so than in the past. You don't see that you are going to say goodbye to your days as the family's benevolent dictator, waking up in the morning and declaring "today we go to the museum" (or on a hike, or to the workshop to build something together, or ...) so make the most of those formative years while you are still the sun their world revolves around!
nunobrito 10y ago
Just to help with feedback, I'm one of those who retired before 30s. Not rich but enough savings to live on a (humble) tropical island until old age. I wasn't able to stop. Applied my savings in day trading, everything went well until 2009 happened and most of it washed away. Applied what remained on the tuition of a top university to up my academic credentials and then went on try other tech industries (e.g. aerospace). Today have a small startup (Europe). Life is hard (empty bank account at the end of the month) but the plus side is that your brain keeps active. If you really like writing technology, in my opinion it gets difficult to stop doing what you naturally enjoy doing.

bfrog 10y ago

How have you not retired yet with a 400-800K bonus is the better question?

otterley 10y ago
It takes about $6M to retire at that standard of living at such an early age.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
schlumpf 10y ago
Because, the IRS.

exwebtina 10y ago

I retired in my early 40s. It was surprisingly boring.

estefan 10y ago
I think there's a reason lots of famous billionaires keep working. I've been hearing from my parents how boring retirement is, and from my own experiences of extended vacations I've come to the conclusion we evolved to work. "Man's Search for Meaning" by Frankl graphically illustrates the importance of having a sense of purpose, which I think a lot of people lack when they retire to live the dream of doing nothing. I think the key is to be able to choose not to have to work for some asshole boss, or do work you don't generally enjoy. I've become very disillusioned by the dream of insane wealth and the ability to retire early. Instead, I want to work on something I feel will make a difference and that interests me for the foreseeable future.
yourapostasy 10y ago
I'm not on the same wavelength as retired people who complain about boredom. If I retired today, I literally have a >5000-line list of ideas, topics and activities I want to pursue, most of them inexpensive or even free to pursue financially for developers, but time-consuming. You could develop software to largely automate the municipal bureaucracy of a village in your nation. It takes a surprising amount of paperwork, and manual labor, to perform even the minimal amount of compliance work to maintain a village. You could work with leaders in each tax levying jurisdiction to agree to publish tax data in a standard online format. You could develop a backyard automated chicken coop, Creative Commons the plans and see what improvements everyone else comes up with. You could develop a vanadium redox battery-powered lawn light, and save landfills from the garbage disposable lights the big box stores inflict upon us today. There is simply an endless sea of opportunities to imbue life around you with increased cognitive density. My head fills with an idea or two every day (usually about improving something I run across in daily life), that acts like an earworm, which I have to write down to "purge out of my mind". It got much "worse" with the advent of search engines; when I was "stuck" with school/university libraries, I would often run into dead ends researching ideas, and could quell the earworms with the thought that I gave an honest effort to run down a thread of an idea. I thought everyone thought like this, but was just better at focusing upon the task at hand and banishing these idle thoughts. I much prefer the situation today with search engines: I'm much faster at running down enough of an idea and putting it into writing to purge it out than before.

joslin01 10y ago

Which B is he playing? B7? Cause if he's barring his chords already... man you did a great job.

mjolk 10y ago

Is this an outlier comp package? When acting as an employee, I make far less, am only there for the money, and still work 10-12 hour days.

zump 10y ago

Not this again. Someone will always make a post about earning a ridiculous salary that will ruin my entire week. I just don't believe people can add 800k of value to an organisation.

trcollinson 10y ago
Really? That's a bit short sighted. I have worked with numerous teams that have produced far more value to the organization than that, and I wasn't in high frequency trading. For example, at HP my team of 10 individuals (1 sales, 1 marketing, 1 PM, 7 engineers) produced a well known SaaS product which produced about $800MM in gross revenue at about a 60% margin for HP. That's a whole lot of value per employee.
- zump 10y ago
  Did you get appropriately reimbursed?
  - trcollinson 10y ago
    The quick answer is no. The funnier answer is we received an award for this particular piece of software (which is still in use and sold for phenomenal profits to this day). We were invited to go to an HP board meeting and receive the award directly from Meg. Unfortunately our entire office was shut down and we were all laid off before the reward date so that our division could save on overhead. Our division manager (who I met on the day we were laid off) accepted the award graciously.
    - zump 10y ago
      Funny, perhaps HFT is an industry you should consider if you wish to be generously rewarded.
      - brokenmachine 10y ago
        I bet if they were paying $800k they were making at least $8M.