People like to work on what they're interested in, and share it. If you've spent a long time becoming a skilled programmer, you probably have a strong interest

People like to work on what they're interested in, and share it. If you've spent a long time becoming a skilled programmer, you probably have a strong interest in software in general and you'd like for a lot of people to use what you make. This causes obvious problems if you want to hire them into a non-software company and keep most of their work in-house. One solution to this is to look for people who are very skilled programmers but have already developed an interest in your problem domain. For example, a scientific company will often look at people who have already worked within that domain, and are skilled with programming, but are willing to move out of a lab-based role and into a purely programming role. (Disclaimer: this describes my current situation.) I'm much less familiar with finance, but you'd probably do well looking for people experienced in finance who have also developed programming skills, rather than pure CS people. If finance is anything like other fields, your best bet is probably to go hunting for grad students. :-)