"Some people are making reports using Excel/VBA or Perl" <-- these are the second-class people, so to speak. "some are building trading gateways in C++ from sc

"Some people are making reports using Excel/VBA or Perl" <-- these are the second-class people, so to speak. "some are building trading gateways in C++ from scratch" <-- depending on the shop, its either support (banks) or first-class (hft) "some are developing trading models (typically requires a PhD or a financial engineering master's)" <-- this is not completely true. GETCO for example hires mostly bachelor's. "getting a job at SIG, Jane Street, etc, is harder than getting a job at Google, Facebook, etc." <-- its primarily harder because the competition is tighter and the work is very different from what silicon valley asks for.