Hmm. I've never worked with the 'frontend' of finance -- I know how your infra, payement processing, massive enterprisey stacks etc work but the day to day stuf

Hmm. I've never worked with the 'frontend' of finance -- I know how your infra, payement processing, massive enterprisey stacks etc work but the day to day stuff the folks on the desks are doing I've not really observed. It's a wide field I guess, but at the end of the day would I be safe to assume that you're mostly playing with data in interesting ways then telling various services/apps (aforementioned chunky java apps, for e.g) to do things based on what you work out from those manipulations? If that's the case, then I really think there is an advantage for you in mastering the 'unix ide', but only if you're doing really custom stuff all the time... If you're working with a bunch of tools that do everything you already need them to do, then of course there's no point in working out how to do the same with different tools. If you're constantly hitting the limits of how you can play with your data, then perhaps it's worth looking into a language which is good at manipulating data and you'd be suprised how powerful this mysterious CLI can be..